Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

argument. Let me quote Herzen's words:

Without controversy, unless he was irritated, he did not talk well;

but when he felt wounded, when his dearest convictions were

touched, and the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice

broke-one should have seen him then: he would fling himself at

his victim like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him

ridiculous, make him pitiful, and in the course of it would develop

his own thought with astonishing power and poetry. The argument would often end in blood which poured from the sick man's throat; pale, choking, with eyes fixed on whoever he was addressing,

he would, with a trembling hand, lift the handkerchief to his

mouth, and stop-terribly upset, undone by his lack of physical

strength. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments !

At dinner with some decayed and respectable official who had

survived from the reign of the Empress Catherine, Belinsky went out

of his way to praise the execution of Louis XVI. Someone ventured

to say in front of him that Chaadaev (a Russian sympathiser with

Roman Catholicism, who had denounced the barbarism of his country)

had, in a civilised country, been very properly declared insane by the

tsar for insulting the dearest convictions of his people. Belinsky, after

vainly tugging at Herzen's sleeve and whispering to him to intervene,

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finally broke in himself, and said in a dead, dull voice that in still

more civilised countries the guillotine was invented for people who

advanced that kind of opinion. The victim was crushed, the host was

alarmed, and the party quickly broke up. Turgenev, who disliked

extremes, and detested scenes, loved and respected Belinsky for

precisely this social fearlessness that he himself conspicuously lacked.

With his friends Belinsky played cards, cracked commonplace

jokes, talked through the night, and charmed and exhausted them all.

He could not bear solitude. He was married unsuitably, from sheer

misery and loneliness. He died of consumption in the early summer

of 1 848. The head of the gendarmerie later expressed fierce regret

that Belinsky had died, adding: 'We would have rotted him in a

fortress.' He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his death,

and at the height of his powers.

For all the external monotony of his days, Belinsky lived a life of

abnormal intensity, punctuated by acute crises, intellectual and moral,

which helped to destroy him physically. The subject which he had

chosen, the subject from which he cannot be separated even in thought,

was literature, and although he was, despite his detractors' charges of

lack of authentic capacity, acutely sensitive to pure literary quality, to

the sounds and rhythms and nuances of words, to images and poetical

symbolism and the purely sensuous emotions directed towards them,

yet that was not the central factor of his life. This centre was the

influence of ideas; not merely in the intellectual or rational sense in

which ideas are judgements or theories, but in that sense which is

perhaps even more familiar, but more difficult to express, in which

ideas embody emotions as well as thoughts, inarticulate as well as

explicit attitudes to the inner and to the outer worlds. This is the

sense in which ideas are something wider and more intrinsic to the

human beings who hold them than opinions or even principles, the

sense in which ideas constitute, and indeed are, the central complex

of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world, and

may be shallow or deep, false or true, closed or open, blind or endowed

with the power of insight. This is something which is discovered in

behaviour, conscious and unconscious, in style, in gestures and actions

and minute mannerisms at least as much as in any explicit doctrine or

professions of faith. It is ideas and beliefs in this sense, as they are

manifested in the lives and works of human beings-what is sometimes

vaguely called ideology-that perpetually excited Belinsky to enthusiasm

or anxiety or loathing, and kept him in a state sometimes amounting

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to a kind of moral frenzy. He believed what he believed very passionately, and sacrificed his entire nature to it. When he doubted he doubted no less passionately, and was prepared to pay any price for

the answers to the questions which tormented him. These questions

were, as might be supposed, about the proper relation of the individual

to himself and to other individuals, to society, about the springs of

human action and feeling, about the ends of life, but in panicular

about the imaginative work of the anist, and his moral purpose.

All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral

questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing

for its own sake. To him this meant the question of what is alone

wonh knowing, saying, doing, and, of course, fighting for-if need be,

dying for. The ideas which he found in books or in conversation were

not for him, in the first place, intrinsically interesting or delightful

or even intellectually imponant, to be examined, analysed, reflected

about in some detached and impartial fashion. Ideas were, above all,

true or false. If false, then like evil spirits to be exorcised. All books

embody ideas, even when least appearing to do so; and it is for these

that, before anything else, the critic must probe. To illustrate this I

shall give you a curious, indeed a grotesque, but nevertheless, it seems

to me, illuminating example of his method. His critics and biographers

do not mention it, since it is a trivial piece of writing. In the course

of his day-to-day journalism Belinsky pul>lished a shon review of a

Russian version of some nineteenth-century French translation of

The Yicar of Walujield. The review starts conventionally enough, but

gradually assumes an irritated and hostile tone: Belinsky does not like

Goldsmith's masterpiece because he thinks it falsifies the moral facts.

He complains that in the character of the Vicar, Goldsmith represents

apathy, placid stupidity, and incompetence as being ultimately superior

to the qualities of the fighter, the reformer, the aggressive champion of

ideas. The Vicar is represented as a simple soul, full of Christian

resignation, unpractical, and constantly deceived; and this natural

goodness and innocence, it is implied, is somehow both incompatible

with, and superior to, cleverness, intellect, action. This to Belinsky

is a deep and damnable heresy. All books embody points of view, rest

on underlying assumptions, social, psychological, and aesthetic, and

the basis on which the Yicar rests is, according to Belinsky, philistine

and false. It is a glorification of persons who are not engaged in the

struggle of life, who stand on the edge uncommitted, dlgagls, and

enter only to be bamboozled and compromised by the active and the

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crooked; which leads them to material defeat but moral victory. But

this, he exclaims, is to pander to irrationalism-to the faith in 'muddling

through' clung to by the average bourgeois everywhere�and to that

extent it is a dishonest representation of cowardice as a deeper wisdom,

of failure, temporising, appeasement, as a profound understanding of

life. One may reply that this is an absurd exaggeration; and places a

ludicrously heavy burden on the shoulders of the poor Vicar. But it

illustrates the beginning of a new kind of social criticism, which

searches in literature neither for ideal 'types' of men or situations (as

the earlier German romantics had taught), nor for an ethical instrument for the direct improvement of life; but for the attitude to life of an individual author, of his milieu, or age or class. This attitude

then requires to be judged as it would be in life in the first place for

its degree of genuineness, its adequacy to its subject-matter, its depth,

its truthfulness, its ultimate motives.

'I am a litterateur,' he wrote. 'I say this with a painful and yet

proud and happy feeling. Russian literature is my life and my blood.'

And this is intended as a declaration of moral status. When the radical

writer, Vladimir Korolenko, at the beginning of this century said 'My

country is not Russia, my country is Russian literature', it is this

position that was being so demonstratively defended. Korolenko was

speaking in the name of a movement which, quite correctly, claimed

Belinsky as its founder, of a creed for which literature alone was

free from the betrayals of everyday Russian life, and alone offered a

hope of justice, freedom, truth.

Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and

death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with

the most devastating violence. He was by temperament not religious,

nor a naturalist, nor an aesthete, nor a scholar. He was a moralist,

secular and anti-clerical through and through. Religion was to him a

detestable insult to reason, theologians were charlatans, the Church a

conspiracy. He believed that objective truth was discoverable in

nature, in society, and in the hearts of men. He was not an impressionist, he was not prepared to confine himself to ethically neutral analysis, or meticulous description without bias or comment, of the

tex�ure of life or of art. This he would have thought, like Tolstoy, or

Henen, shallow, self-indulgent or frivolous, or else (if you knew the

moral truth but preferred the outer texture) deliberate and odious

cynicism. The texture was an outer integument, and if you wanted to

understand what life was really like (and therefore what it could

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become), you had to distinguish what is eternal and desperately

important from the the ephemeral, however attractive. It was not

enough to look at or even re-create what Virginia Woolf called the

'semi-transparent envelope' which encloses our existence from life to

death; you had to sink beneath the mere flow of life, and examine

the structure of the ocean bed, and how the winds blow and how the

tides flow, not as an end in itself (for no man may be indifferent to

his own fate), but in order to master the elements and to steer your

craft, it may be with unending suffering and heroism, it may be against

infinitely great odds, towards the goal of truth and social justice which

you in fact know to be (because this cannot be doubted) the only goal

worth seeking for its own sake. To linger on the surface, to spend

yourself in increasingly elaborate descriptions of its properties and of

your own sensations, was either moral idiocy or calculated immoral ism,

either blindness or a craven lie which would in the end destroy the

man who told it. The truth alone was beautiful and it was always

beautiful, it could never be hideous or destructive or bleak or trivial,

and it did not live in the outer appearance. It lay 'beneath' (as Schelling,

Plato, Hegel taught) and was revealed only to those who cared for

the truth alone, and was therefore not for the neutral, the detached,