Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

the cautious, but for the morally committed, for those who were

prepared to sacrifice all they had in order to discover and vindicate the

truth, and liberate themselves and others from the illusions, conventions, and self-deceptions which blinded men about the world and their duty in it. This creed was the creed, then enunciated for the first

time, of the Russian intelligentsia, of the moral and political opposition

to autocracy, to the Orthodox Church, and to nationalism, the triple

slogan of the supporters of the regime.

Naturally, with a temperament of a Lucretius or a Beethoven,

Belinsky as a critic was, unlike his western contemporaries, neither a

classically pure connoisseur of Platonic forms like Landor, nor a

sharp, pessimistic, disillusioned observer of genius like Sainte-Beuve;

he was a moralist, painfully and hopefully sifting the chaff from the

grain. If anything seemed to him new or valuable or important or

even true, he would fly into ecstasies of enthusiasm and proclaim his

discovery to the world in hurrying, ill-written, impassioned sentences,

as if to wait might be fatal because the attention of the vacillating

public might be distracted. Moreover one must herald the truth

tumultuously, for to speak in an even voice would perhaps not indicate

its crucial importance. And in this way Belinsky, in his exuberance,

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did discover and over-praise a handful of comparatively unknown and

worthless writers and critics whose names are today justly forgotten.

But he also revealed, and for the first time, the full glory of the great

sun of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, and he discovered and

assessed at their true worth Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and

Dostoevsky, not to· mention such writers of the second rank as

Goncharov, or Grigorovich, or Koltsov. Of course Pushkin had been

recognised as a writer of genius before Belinsky had begun writing,

but it was Belinsky's eleven famous essays that established his importance, not merely as a poet of magnificent genius, but as being, in the literal sense, the creator of Russian literature, of its language, its

direction, and its place in the national life. Belinsky created the image

of Pushkin, which henceforth dominated Russian writing, as a man

who stood to literature as Peter the Great to the Russian state, the

radical reformer, the breaker of the old, the creator of the new; the

implacable enemy and the faithful child of the national tradition, as

at once the invader of hitherto remote foreign territory, and the

integrator of the deepest and most national elements of the Russian

past. With consistency and passionate conviction, Belinsky paints the

portrait of a poet who justly saw himself as a herald and a prophet,

because by his art he had made Russian society aware of itself as a

spiritual and political entity, with its appalling inner conflicts, its

anachronisms, its anomalous position among other nations, its huge

untried strength and dark and tantalising future. With a multitude

of examples he demonstrates that this was Pushkin's achievement,

and not that of his predecessors-the official trumpeters of Russia's

spirit and Russia's might- even of the most civilised and talented,

such as the epic poet Derzhavin, the admired historian Karamzin, or

his own mentor, the generous, romantic, mellifluous, always delightful

Zhukovsky.

This unique domination of literature over life, and of one man

over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a

fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied

in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer

or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever

may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognised, the work of

Belinsky and his disciples; who first saw in Pushkin the central planet,

the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling

grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and,

in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful and whimsical man, thought

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this embarrassing and spoke o f the angular and unfashionable Belinsky

as 'a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to

adore me'. He was a little frightened of him, half suspected that he

had something to say, thought of asking him to contribute to the

journal which he edited, recollected that his friends thought him

unpresentable, and successfully avoided a personal meeting.

Pushkin's snobbery, his intermittent attempts to pretend that he

was an aristocratic dilettante and not a professional man of letters at

all, touched the socially sensitive Belinsky on the raw, just as the

mask of worldly cynicism which Lermontov adopted had offended

him at their first meeting. Nevertheless, in the presence of genius

Belinsky forgot everything. He forgot Pushkin's coldness, he realised

that behind Lermontov's Byronic mask, his insulting cynicism and

desire to wound and be wounded, there was a great lyrical poet, a

serious and penetrating critic, and a tormented human being_gf great

tenderness and depth. The genius of these men had bound its spell

upon him, and it is really in terms o_0beiE;and in particular Push kin's,

art and personality that Belinsky, -whether he was aware of it or not,

tried to define his own ideas of what a creative artist is and should be.

As a critic he remained, all his life, a disciple of the great German

romantics. He sharply rejected the didactic and utilitarian doctrines of

the function of art, then enjoying a vogue among the French socialists:

'Poetry has no purpose beyond itself. It is its own end, as truth is of

knowledge, and the good of action.' Earlier in the same article he says:

The whole world, its . . . colours and sounds, all the forms of nature

and of life, can be poetical phenomena; but its essence is that which

is concealed in these appearances . • . that in them which enchants

and fascinates by the play oflife . . . [The poet] is an impressionable,

irritable organism, always active, which at the lightest touch gives

off electric sparks, suffers more painfully, savours pleasures more

fiercely than others, loves more violently, hates with more passion . . .

And again :

[Literature is] the fruit of free inspiration, of the united though not

the organised efforts of men . . . who fully express . . . the spirit of

the people . . . whose inward life they manifest . • . in its most

hidden depths and pulsations.

He rejected with passion the notion of art as a social weapon then

preached by George Sand and Pierre Leroux:

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Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet,

your works will contain them without your knowledge-they will

be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.

This is an echo of August Wilhelm Schlegel and his allies. And

from this early view Belinsky never retreated. Annenkov says that

he looked in art for an 'integral' answer to all human needs-to repair

the gaps left by other, less adequate forms of experience; that he felt

that perpetual return to the great classical works would regenerate

and ennoble the reader, that they alone would resolve-by transforming

his vision until the true relations of things were revealed -all moral

and political problems; provided always that they remained spontaneous

and self-subsistent works of art: worlds in themselves, and not the sham

structures of moral or social propaganda. Belinsky altered his opinions

often and painfully; but to the end of his days he believed that artand in particular literature-gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse-the more purely artistic the workthe clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but

always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and

unconscious, the artist was, a function without which he became

trivial and worthless, and in _the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance. None of this would have been denied by his Slavophil opponents: their disagreements lay elsewhere.

And yet, despite his historicism-common to all romantics- Belinsky

does not belong to those whose main purpose and skill consist in a

careful critical or historical analysis of artistic phenomena, in relating

a work of art or an artist to a precise social background, analysing

specific influences upon his work, examining and describing the

methods which he uses, providing psychological or historical explanations of the success or failure of the particular .effects which he achieves. Belinsky did indeed now and then perform such tasks; and

was, in effect, the first and greatest of Russian literary historians. But

he detested detail and had no bent for scrupulous scholarship; he read

unsystematically and widely; he read and read in a feverish, frantic

way until he could bear it no longer, and then he wrote. This gives

his writing an unceasing vitality, but it is scarcely the stuff of which

balanced scholarship is made. Yet his criticism of the eighteenth century

is not as blind and sweeping as his detractors have maintained. His

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work i n assigning their due place to earlier Russian writers (for

example, Tredyakovsky, Khemnitser, Lomonosov, Fonvizin and

Dmitriev), and in particular his pages on the poet Derzhavin and the

fabulist Krylov, are a model of insight and lucid judgment. And he

did kill the reputations of a number of eighteenth-century mediocrities

and imitators once and for all.

But a capacity for lasting literary verdicts is not where his genius

lay. His unique quality as a literary critic, the quality which he

possessed to a degree scarcely equalled by anyone in the west, is the

astonishing freshness and fuUness with which he reacts to any and

every literary impression, whether of style or of content, and the

passionate devotion and scruple with which he reproduces and paints

in words the vivid original character, the colour and shape, above all

the moral quality of his direct impressions. His life, his whole being,

went into the attempt to seize the essence of the literary experience

which he was at any given moment trying to convey. He had an

exceptional capacity both for understanding and for articulating, but

what distinguished him from other, at least in this respect equally

gifted, critics, Sainte-Beuve for example, or Matthew Arnold, was

that his vision was wholly direct-there is, as it were, nothing between

him and the object. Several of his contemporaries, among them

Turgenev, noted an almost physical likeness to a hawk or a falcon: