Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

faith. He had earlier toyed with the idealism of Fichte and Schelling,

as expounded by Stankevich, the effect of which had been to turn him

away from political issues altogether, as a sordid chaos of the trivial,

empirical world, a delusive curtain concealing the harmonious reality

beyond. This was now finished and done with. He moved to St

Petersburg, and under the influence of his new r�ligion wrote two

celebrated articles in I 839-40, one reviewing a poem and a work of

prose on an anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, the other a criticism

of an attack by a German Hegelian on Goethe. 'The real is the

rational,' the new doctrine had said. It was childish and shallow and

short-sighted to attack or seek to alter reality. What is, is, because it

must be. To understand it is to understand the beauty and the harmony

of everything as it falls into its own appointed time and place in

accordance with intelligible and necessary laws. Everything has its

place in the vast scheme of nature unrolling its pattern like a great

carpet of history. To criticise is only to show that you are not adjusted

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to reality and that you do not sufficiently understand it. There were

no half-measures for Belinsky. Henen tells us that once Belinsky

finally adopted a view,

he did not quail before any consequences. He would not stop at

anything, neither considerations of moral propriety, nor the opinion

of others, which tends to frighten weaker and less elemental natures.

He knew no fear, because he was strong and sincere; his conscience

was clear.

His (or Bakunin's) interpretation oi Hegel's doctrine had convinced

him that contemplation and understanding was an attitude spiritually

superior to that of active fighting: consequently he threw himself

into 'acceptance of reality' with the same frenzy of passion as that

with which only two years later he was to attack the quietists and

demand active resistance to Nicholas l's abominations.

In 1 839-40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that history

itself-the march of the inevitable forces-sanctified the actual; that

autocracy was, coming when it did, sacred ; that Russia was as it was

as part of a divine scheme marching towards an ideal goal; that the

government-the representative of power and coercion-was wiser than

its citizens; that protests against it were frivolous, wicked, and vain.

Resistance to cosmic forces is always suicidal.

Reality is a monster (he wrote to Bakunin ], armed with iron talons,

a huge mouth and huge jaws. Sooner or later she will devour everyone who resists her, who cannot live at peace with her. To be free-and instead of a terrible monster to see in her the source of

happiness-there is only one means-to know her.

And again:

I look upon reality, which I used to hold in such contempt, and

tremble with mystic joy, recognising its rationality, realising that

nothing of it may be rejected, nothing in it may be condemned or

spurned.

And in the same vein:

Schiller was . . . my personal enemy, and it was only with great

effort that I was able to prevent my hatred of him from going

beyond the bounds of such decency as I was capable of. Why this

hatred?

Because, he goes on to say, Schiller's works Die Rauber, Kabalt und

Liebe and Fiesco 'induced in me a wild hatred of the social order, in

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the name of an abstract ideal of society, cut o ff from the geographical

and historical conditions of development, built in mid-air.' This echoes,

but in a politically far more sinister form, the relatively harmless

maxims of earlier, Fichtean Idealism, when he would declare that

society is always more right than the individual, or 'The individual is

real and not a phantom only to the degree to which he is an individual

expression of the universal.'

His friends were stupefied into silence. This was nothing less than

a major betrayal by the most single-minded and most fearless of all

the radical leaders . .The shock was so painful that in Moscow it could

scarcely be discussed at all. Belinsky knew precisely what effect his

secession would cause, and said so in his letters; nevertheless he saw

no way out. He had reached his conclusion by a rational process, and

if the choice was between betraying the truth and betraying his friends,

he must be man enough to betray his friends. Indeed the thought of

the appalling pain that this would cause him somehow merely underlined the inescapable necessity of this great sacrifice to principle. This acceptance of 'the iron laws' of social development and the march of

history as being not merely inevitable but just, rational, morally

liberating, was nevenheless marked, both then and later, by a profound

disgust with the conditions of Russian society in general and of his

own society in panicular.

Our life (he wrote to Konstantin Aksakov in I 840 ], what

sort of life is it to be? Where is it and what is it about? We are

so many individuals outside a society, because Russia is not a

society. We possess neither a political nor a religious nor a scientific

nor a literary life. Boredom, apathy, frustration, fruitless effortsthat is our life . . . China is a disgusting state, but more disgusting is a state which possessed rich materials for life but which is held in

an iron frame like a rickety child.

And the remedy? Conformity to the powers that be: adjustment

to 'reality'. Like many a communist of a later date Belinsky gloried

in the very weight of the chains with which he had chosen to bind

his limbs, in the very narrowness and darkness which he had willed

to suffer; the sl.ock and disgust of his friends was itself evidence of the

vastness, and therefore of the grandeur and the moral necessity, of the

sacrifice. There is no ecstasy to compare to that of self-immolation.

This condition lasted for a year, and then he could bear it no longer.

Herzen paid a visit to him in St Petersburg; it had begun in a frigid

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and awkward manner, and then in a great burst of emotion Belinsky

broke down, and admitted that the Hegelian year, with its wilful

'acceptance' and glorification of the black reaction of the regime, was

a heavy nightmare, an offering upon the altar not of truth but of an

insane logical consistency. What he cared about, what he had never

ceased to care about, was not the historical process or the condition

of the universe or the solemn march of the Hegelian God through

the world, but the lives and liberties and aspirations of individual men

and women whose sufferings no sublime universal harmony could

explain away or redeem. From that moment he never looked back.

The relief was immense:

I abominate [he wrote to Botkin] my contemptible desire to reconcile myself with a contemptible reality ! Long live the great Schiller, noble advocate of humanity, bright star of salvation, the emancipator of society from the blood-stained prejudices of tradition ! 'Long live reason, and may the darkness perish' as great Pushkin used to

exclaim ! The human personality is now above history, above society,

above humanity for me . . . good Lord, it frightens me to think of

what must have been happening to me-fever, madness- I feel like

a convalescent now . . . I will not make my peace or adjust myself

to vile realities. I look for happiness only in the world of fancy,

only fantasies make me happy. As for reality- reality is an executioner . . .

I am tormented by the thought of the pleasures I have let go

because of the contemptible idealism and feebleness of my character.

God knows what vile, revolting nonsense I have talked in print,

with all the sincerity and fanaticism of deep, wild conviction . . •

What horrible zigzags my path towards truth seems to involve;

what a terrible price I have had to pay, what fearful blunders I

have had to commit for the sake of truth, and what a bitter truth it

is-how vile the world is, especially in our neighbourhood.

And in the same year:

And oh the mad nonsense which I have poured out . . . against the

French, that energetic and noble nation, shedding its blood for the

most sacred rights of mankind . . . I have awoken and recollect my

dreams with horror . . .

And apropos the inexorable march of the Spirit (Herzen records) :

So it is not for myself that I create, but for the Spirit . . . Really what

kind of an idiot does it take me for? I'd rather not think at allwhat do I care about Its consciousness?

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And in his letters there are passages in which such sacred metaphysical

entities as Universality- Cosmic Consciousness-the Spirit-the rational

State etc. are denounced as a Moloch of abstraction devouring living

human beings.

A year later he finally settled accounts with the master himself:

All Hegel's talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the

objective realm of thought there is no morality . . . Even if I

attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development, I

should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the

victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself off head-downwards . . . I am told

that disharmony is a condition of harmony. This may be found

agreeable . . . by musical persons, but is not quite so satisfactory

from the point of view of those whose fate it is to express in their

lives the element of disharmony.

And in the same year he tries to explain the aberration:

. . . because we understood that for us there is no life in real life, and

because our nature was such that without life we could not live, we

ran away into the world of books, and began to live and to love

according to books, and made life and love a kind of occupation, a

kind of work, an anxious labour . . . In the end we bored and

irritated and maddened each other . . .

Be social or die ! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that solitary genius should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the

mud? What is it to me if I do apprehend . . . the essence of art or

religion or history, if I cannot share this with all those who should

be my human brothers, my brethren in Christ, but are in fact

strangers and enemies because of their ignorance? . . . I cannot bear

the sight of barefoot boys playing . . . in the gutter, poor men in

tatters, the drunken cab-driver, the soldier coming off duty, the

official padding along with a portfolio under his arm, the selfsatisfied army officer, the haughty nobleman. When I give a penny to a soldier or a beggar I almost cry, I run from him as if I had done