Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

inRuence is negligible . . . Belinsky's proselytes increase.

Plainly we are dealing with a major phenomenon of some kind someone to whom, eight years after his death, idealistic young men, during one of the worst moments of repression in the nineteenth

century, looked as their leader. The literary reminiscences of the

young radicals of the 30s and 4os- Panaev and his wife, Turgenev,

Herzen, Annenkov, Ogareva, Dostoevsky-agree in stressing this

aspect of Belinsky as the 'conscience' of the Russian intelligentsia, the

inspired and fearless publicist, the ideal of the young rlvoltls, the

writer who almost alone in Russia had the character and the eloquence

to proclaim clearly and harshly what many felt, but either could not

or would not openly declare.

We can easily imagine the kind of young man Aksakov was speaking

of. In Turgenev's novel Rudin there is a mildly ironical, but sympathetic and touching, portrait of a typical radical of that time, employed 1 50

V I SSARION B E L INSKY

as tutor in a country house. He is a plain-looking, awkward, clumsy

university student, neither intelligent nor interesting; indeed he is

dim, provincial, rather a fool, but pure-hearted, embarrassingly

sincere and self-revealing, and comically naive. The student is a

radical not in the sense that he holds clear intellectual or moral

political views, but because he is filled with a vague but bitter hostility

towards the government of his country, the grey, brutish soldiers, the

dull, dishonest, and frightened officials, the illiterate, superstitious, and

sycophantic priests; with a deep distaste for the peculiar mixture

compounded of fear, greed, and a dislike of everything new or connected with the forces of life, which formed the prevailing Russian atmosphere. He is in full reaction against the queer variety of cynical

resignation which accepted the starved and semi-barbarous condition

of the serfs and the deathly stagnation of provincial Russian society as

something not merely natural, but possessing a deep, traditional value,

almost a kind of spiritual beauty, the object of a peculiar, nationalist,

quasi-religious mystique of its own. Rudin is the life and soul of the

house-party, and the young tu�or is completely taken in by his specious

liberal rhetoric, worships the ground Rudin treads on, and fills his

easy generalisations with all his own moral enthusiasm and faith in

truth and material progress. When Rudin, still gay and charming and

irresistible, still overflowing with empty liberal platitudes, refuses to

face a moral crisis, makes feeble excuses, behaves like a craven and a

fool, and gets himself out of an awkward predicament by a squalid

piece of minor treachery, his follower, the simple seeker after truth,

is left dazed, helpless, and outraged, not knowing what to believe or

which way to turn, in a typical Turgenev situation in which everyone

ends by behaving with weakness and irresponsibility that is human,

disarming, and disastrous. The tutor Basistov is a very minor figure,

but he is a direct if humble descendant of the foil-and sometimes the

dupe-ofthe or.iginal 'superfluous man' of Russian society, of Pushkin's

Lensky (as opposed to Onegin); he is of the same stock as Pierre

Bezukhov (as against Prince Andrey) in War and Peact, as Levin in

Anna Kartnina and all the Karamazovs, as Krutsifersky in Herzen's

novel Who is to hlame?, as the student in The Cherry Orc.�ard, as

Colonel Vershinin and the Baron in The Three Sisters. He is, in the

context of the 1 84os, the figure that came to be thought of as one of

the characteristic figures in the Russian social novel, the perplexed

idealist, the touchingly naive, over-enthusiastic, pure-hearted man,

the victim of misfortunes which could be averted but in fact never

R U SSIAN TH I NK E R S

are. Sometimes comial, sometimes tragical, often confused, blundering,

and inefficient, he is incapable of any falseness, or, at least, of irremediable falseness, of anything in any degree sordid or treacherous; sometimes weak and self-pitying, like Chekhov's heroes-sometimes strong and furious like Bazarov in Fathers and Children-he never loses an

inner dignity and an indestructible moral personality in contrast with

which the ordinary philistines who form the vast majority of normal

society appear at once pathetic and repulsive.

The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other

times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs

in the cause of the humiliated and the defeated-the actual, historical

embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual

heroism- is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky. His name became the

greatest Russian myth in the nineteenth century,, detestable to the

supporters of autocracy, the Orthodox Church, and fervid nationalism,

disturbing to elegant and fastidious lovers of western classicism, and

for the same reasons the idealised ancestor of both the reformers and

the revolutionaries of the second half of the century. In a very real

sense he was one of the founders of the movement which culminated

in I 9 I 7 in the overthrow of the social order which towards the end

of his life he increasingly denounced. There is scarcely a radical

Russian writer-and few liberals-who did not at some stage claim to

be descended from him. Even such timid and half-hearted members

of the opposition as Annenkov and Turgenev worshipped his memory,

even the conservative government censor, Goncharov, spoke of him

as the best man he had ever known. As for the true left-wing authors

of the 1 86os-the revolutionary propagandists Dobrolyubov and

Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, and the

socialists who followed them, Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and his

followers-they �ormally recognised him as one of the earliest, and,

with Herzen, the greatest of the heroes of the heroic 40s, when the

organised struggle for full social as well as political freedom, economic

as well as civil equality, was held to have begun in the Russian Empire.

Clearly, then, he was, to say the least, an arresting figure in the

history of Russian social thought. Those who have read the memoirs

of his friends, Herzen, Turgenev, and of course Annenkov, will

discover for themselves the reason for this. But in the west Belinsky

is even now relatively unknown. Yet, as anyone knows who has read

at all widely in his works, he is the father of the social criticism of

literature, not only in Russia but perhaps even in Europe, the most

I 52.

V I S SARION BELINSKY

gifted and formidable enemy of the aesthetic and religious and mystical

attitudes to life. Throughout the nineteenth century his views were

the great battlefield between Russian critics, that is, between two

incompatible views of art and indeed of life. He was always very poor,

and he wrote to keep alive, and, therefore, too much. Much of his

writing was composed in fearful haste, and a great deal is uninspired

hackwork. But in spite of all the hostile criticism to which he has

been exposed from his earliest beginnings as a critic (and let me add

that Belinsky is to this day the subject of heated controversy-no other

figure dead for over a century has excited so much devotion and so

much odium among Russians), his best work is in Russia regarded as

classical and immortal. In the Soviet Union his place is all too secure,

for (despite his lifelong war against dogma and conformism) he has

there long been canonised as a founding father of the new form of

life. But the moral and political issue with which he was concerned is,

in the west, open still. This alone makes him a figure of interest at

the present time.

His life was outwardly uneventful. He was born in poverty in I 8 I o

or I 8 1 1 , at Sveaborg in Finland, and brought up in the remote city

of Chembar in the province of Penza. His father was a retired naval

doctor who settled down to a small practice and to drink. He grew up

a thin, consumptive, over-serious, pinched little boy, prematurely old,

unsmiling and always in deadly earnest, who soon attrac!ed the

attention of his schoolmasters by his single-minded devotion to

literature, and his grim, unseasonable, and apparently devouring

passion for the truth. He went to Moscow as a poor scholar with a

government stipend, and after the normal troubles and misfortunes

of impoverished students of humble birth in what was still the home

of the gentry and nobility-the University of Moscow- was expelled

for reasons which are still obscure, but probably connected with lack

of solid knowledge, and the writing of a play denouncing serfdom.

The play, which survives, is very badly written, rhetorical, mildly

subversive, and worthless as a work of literature, but the moral was

plain enough for the intimidated university censors, and the author

was poor and lacked protectors. Nadezhdin, then a liberal young

professor of European literature at the university, who edited an ovantgarde periodical, was impressed by Belinsky's obvious seriousness and passion for literature, thought that he detected a spark of inspiration,

and engaged him to write reviews. From I 835 until his death thirteen

years later, Belinsky poured out a steady stream of articles, critical

,,

1 53

R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

notices, and reviews i n various journals. They split educated Russian

opinion into rival camps, and became the gospel of the progressive

young men in every corner of the Empire, particularly of the university

students who became his most devoted and fanatical followers.

In appearance Belinsky was of middle height, thin, bony, and slightly

stooped; his face was pale, slightly mottled, and flushed easily when he

was excited. He was asthmatic, tired easily, and usually looked worn

out, haggard, and rather grim. His movements were awkward, like a

peasant's, nervous and abrupt, and before strangers he tended to be

shy, brusque and sullen. With his intimates, the young radicals,

Turgenev, Botkin, Bakunin, Granovsky, 'he was full of life and

irrepressible gusto. In the heat of a literary or philosophical discussion

his eyes would shine, his pupils dilate, he would walk from corner

to corner talking loudly, rapidly, and with violent intensity, coughing

and waving his arms. In society he was clumsy and uncomfortable

and tended to be silent, but if he heard what he regarded as wicked

or unctuous sentiments he intervened on principle, and Herzen

testifies that on such occasions no opponent could stand before the

force of his terrible moral fury. He was at his best when excited by