Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

and indeed he used to pounce upon a writer like a bird of prey, and

tear him limb from limb until he had said all he had to say. His

expositions were often too prolix, the style is uneven and sometimes

tedious and involved; his education was haphazard, and his words

have little elegance and little intrinsic magic. But when he has found

himself, when he is dealing with an author worthy of him, whether

he is praising or denouncing, speaking of ideas and attitudes to life,

or of prosody and idiom, the vision is so intense, he has so much to

say, and says it in so first-hand a fashion, the experience is so vivid

and conveyed with such uncompromising and uninterrupted force,

that the effect of his words is almost as powerful and unsettling

today as it was upon his own contemporaries. He himself said that

no one could understand a poet or a thinker who did not for a time

become wholly immersed in his world, letting himself be dominated

by his outlook, identified with his emotions; who did not, in short,

try to live through the writer's experiences, beliefs, and convictions.

In this way he did in fact 'live through' the influence of Shakespeare

and Pushkin, Gogo) and George Sand, Schiller and Hegel, and as he

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changed his spiritual domicile he altered his attitude and denounced

what he had previously praised, and praised what he had previously

denounced. Later critics have accused him of being a chameleon, a

sensitive surface which reflected too much and altered too quickly,

an unreliable guide, without a permanent core of inner principle, too

impressionable, too undisciplined, vivid and eloquent, but without a

specific, firm, critical personality, without a definite approach or an

identifiable point of view. But this is unjust, and none of his contemporaries who knew him best would have begun to understand such a judgement. If ever there lived a man of rigorous, indeed overrigorous, and narrow principle, dominated all his life by a remorseless, never-ceasing, fanatical passion for the truth, unable to compromise

or adapt himself, even for a short time and superficially, to anything

which he did not wholly and utterly believe, it was Belinsky. 'If a

man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted

to his own vanity rather than to the truth,' he said. Belinsky radically

altered his opinions twice, each time after a painful crisis. On each

occasion he suffered with an intensity which Russians seem particularly

capable of conveying by the use of words, and he gave a full account

of it, principally in his letters, the most moving in the Russian language.

Those who have read them will know what I mean by the heroic

quality of his grimly undeviating, perpetually self-scrutinising honesty

of mind and feeling.

Belinsky held several intellectual positions in his life, and turned

from one to another and exhausted each to the uttermost until, with

great tormenting effort, he would liberate himself from it, to begin

the struggle over again. He arrived at no final or consistent outlook,

and the efforts by tidy-minded biographers to divide his thought into

three or more distinct 'periods', each neatly self-contained and coherent,

ignore too many facts: Belinsky is always 'relapsing' towards earlier,

'abandoned', positions; his consistency was moral, not intellectual. He

began to philosophise in the mid- I 8 30s, as a young man of twentythree, with that disgust and sense of being asphyxiated by the police state of Nicholas I which all young intellectuals with hearts and

consciences felt, and he adopted the philosophy then preacheJ by the

young Moscow philosophers, Stankevich and Bakunin, to whose

circle he belonged. Idealism was a reaction to the grim suppression

which followed the abortive Decembrist revolt in 1 825. The young

Russian intellectuals, encouraged as they were to go to Germany

rather than to Louis Philippe's dangerously fermenting France,

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returned full of German metaphysics. Life on earth, material existence,

above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant. The only

thing that mattered was the ideal life created by the spirit, the great

imaginative constructions by means of which man transcended the

frustrating material environment, freed himself from its squalor, and

identified himself with nature and with God. The history of western

Europe revealed many such sublime achievements, and it was idle

nationalistic cant to pretend that Russia had anything to put beside

this. Russian culture (so Belinsky in the I 8JOS was telling his readers)

was an artificial, imported growth, and till Pushkin arose, could not

be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and

Schiller, or even such great realistic writers as Walter Scott and (of

all writers) Fenimore Cooper. Russian folk-song and hyliny and

popular epics were more contemptible than even the second- and

third-rate imitations of French models which formed the miserable

collection of reproductions dignified under the name of national

Russian literature. As for the Slavophils, their passion for old Russian

ways and manners, for traditional Slav dress and Russian song and

dances, for archaic musical instruments, for the rigidities of Byzantine

Orthodoxy, their contrast of the spiritual depth and wealth of the

Slavs with the decadent and 'rotting' west, corrupted by superstition

and sordid materialism-this was childish vanity and delusion. What

had Byzantium given? Its direct descendants, the southern Slavs,

were among the deadest and dullest of all European nations. If all the

Montenegrins died tomorrow, Belinsky cried in one of his revic:;ws,

the world would be none the poorer. Compared to one noble voice

from the eighteenth century, one Voltaire, one Robespierre, what had

Byzantium and Russia to offer? Only the great Peter, and he belonged

to the west. As for the glorification of the meek and pious peasantthe holy fool touched with grace- Belinsky, who, unlike the Slavophils, was by birth not a nobleman or a gentleman, but the son of a sodden

small-town doctor, looked on agriculture not as romantic and ennobling,

but merely as degrading and stupefying. The Slavophils infuriated him

by talking romantic and reactionary nonsense in their attempt to arrest

scientific progress by appeals to ancient and, as often as not, nonexistent traditions. Nothing was more contemptible than false, twopence-coloured nationalism, archaic clothes, a hatred of foreigners,

and a desire to undo the great heroic work which Peter the Great had

so boldly and magnificently begun. Like the Encyclopedists of the

eighteenth century in France, whose temper his much resembled,

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Belinsky at the beginning of his career (and again towards

the end of his life) believed that only an enlightened despot-by

enforcing education, technical progress, material civilisation-could

rescue the benighted, barbarous Russian nation. In a letter to a friend

written in 1 837 he writes:

Above all you should abandoq politics and guard yourself against

the influence of politics on your ways of thought. Here in Russia,

politics has no meaning, and only empty heads can have anything

to do with it . . . If each of the individuals who compose Russia

could reach perfection by means of love, Russia would be the

happiest country in the world without any politics-education, that

is the road to happiness . . .

and again (in the same letter) :

Peter is clear evidence that Russia will not develop her liberty and

her civil structure out of her own resources, but will obtain it at the

hands of her tsars as so much else. True, we do not as yet possess

rights-we are, if you like, slaves; but that is because we still need

to be slaves. Russia is an infant and needs a nurse in whose breast

there beats a heart full of love for her fledgling, and in whose hand

there is a rod ready to punish it if it is naughty. To give the child

complete liberty is to ruin it. To give Russia in her present state a

constitution is to ruin her. To our people liberty . . . simply means

licence. The liberated Russian nation would not go to a parliament,

but run to the taverns to drink, break glass, and hang the gentry

because they shave their beards and wear European clothes . . . The

hope of Russia is education, not . . . constitutions and revolutions . . .

France has had two revolutions, and as a result of them a constitution. And in this constitutional France there is far less liberty of thought than in autocratic Prussia.

and again:

Our autocracy gives us complete freedom of thought and reflection,

but limits our freedom to raise our voices and interfere in her affairs.

It allows us to import books from abroad which it forbids us to

translate or publish. And this is right and just, because what you

may know the muzhik may not; an idea which might be good for

you, might be fatal to the muzhik, who would naturally misunderstand it . . . Wine is good for adults who know what to do with it, but fatal to children, and politics is wine which in Russia may even

turn into opium . . . And so to the devil with the French. Their

influence has brought us nothing but harm. We imitated their

.,.

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literature, and killed our own . . . Germany-that i s the Jerusalem

of modern humanity.

Even the Russian nationalist school did not go so far. At a time

when even so western a thinker as Herzen, not to speak of mild

liberals such as Granovsky and Kavelin, was prepared to temporise,

and indeed to some degree shared the Slavophils' deep and sincere

feeling for the Russian tradition and older forms of life, Belinsky

would not bend. Western Europe, more particularly enlightened

despotism, was responsible for the major achiev."!ments of mankind.

There and only there were the forces of life and the critical canons

of scientific and philosophical truth, which alone made progress

possible. The Slavophils had turned their backs on this, and however

worthy their motives, they were blind and leaders of the blind, returning to the ancient slough of ignorant barbarism and weakness from which it had taken the great Peter such efforts to lift, or half-lift, his

primitive people; salvation lay in this alone. This doctrine is radical,

individualist, enlightened, and anti-democratic. Soviet authors in

search of texts to justify the progressive role of ruthless governing

elites find much to quote from Belinsky's early writings.

Meanwhile Bakunin had begun to preach Hegel to Belinsky, who

knew no German. Night after night he preached the new objectivism

to him, as he did later in Paris to Proudhon. Finally, after a fearful

inner struggle, Belinsky was converted to the new anti-individualist