Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

father of polite letters and of the natural sciences in his country,

Mikhail Lomonosov -'the Russian Leonardo'- was1a man of obscure

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and humble origin, but he rose and was transformed. There is a good

deal that is robust and vigorous, but nothing primitive, no trace of a

rustic accent in his writing. He had all the zeal of a convert and a

self-taught one at that, and did more than anyone to establish the

formal conventions of Russian literary prose and verse in the later

eighteenth century, rigorously modelled on the most elaborate European-that is to say French -practice of the time. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century the social elite alone possessed

enough education, leisure, and trained taste to pursue the fine arts,

and in particular literature: they looked to the mandarins of the west,

and borrowed little-at most here and there a touch of local colourfrom the traditional arts and crafts still practised with skill and imagination by peasants and artisans in forgotten corners of the great

empire. Literature was an elegant accomplishment and was practised

largely by aristocratic dilettanti and their proteges in St Petersburg,

and to a lesser extent in Moscow- the first the seat of the government,

the second the home of wealthy merchants and of the more solid and

old-fashioned nobility, who looked with distaste on the chilly and

sophisticated atmosphere of the Europeanised capital. The most

characteristic names in the first generation of the great literary

renaissance-Karamzin and Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Griboedov,

Baratynsky and Venevitinov, Vyazemsky and Shakhovskoy, Ryleev

and both Odoevskys- belong to this social stratum. A few individuals

from outside were, indeed, permitted to enter: the critic and journalist

Polevoy, the pioneer of literary naturalism in Russia, was the son of

a merchant in Siberia; the lyrical poet Koltsov was a peasant to the

end of his days. But such exceptions did not greatly affect the established literary hierarchy. The socially humble Polevoy, after beginning bravely enough as a frondeur against the elite, gradually assimilated

himself completely to the style and methods of the dominant group,

and ended his life (it is true, after persecution by the authorities) as a

tame and frightened supporter of the Orthodox Church and the autocratic government. Koltsov, who retained his country idiom to the end, achieved fame precisely as such -as a primitive of genius, the simple

peasant unspoilt by fame who charmed the sophisticated ulons by

the freshness and spontaneity of his gifts, and touched his well-born

admirers by the almost exaggerated humility of his manner, and by

his unhappy and self-effacing life.

Belinsky broke this tradition and broke it for ever. This he did

because he entered the company of his social superiors on his own

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terms-without surrendering anything. H e was an uncouth provincial

when he arrived in Moscow, and he retained many of the tastes,

prejudices, and habits of his class to the end of his life. He was born

in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of

an obscure country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to

some degree, soften and civilise him, but there remained to the end

a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious, rough, sometimes aggressive

tone in his writing. This tone enters Russian literature, never to

leave it. Throughout the nineteenth century it is the distinguishing

characteristic of the political radicals impatient of the urbanity of the

non-political or conservative intelligentsia. As the revolutionary movement grew in intensity, this note becomes by turns strident and violent, or muted and ominous. Its use gradually became a matter of principle:

a weapon deliberately employed by the intellectual sans-culottts against

the supporters of the established order, the rude and defiant tone of

the leaders of the underprivileged and oppressed, determined to do

away once and for all with the polite fictions which merely conceal

the deadness, futility, and above all the heartless wickedness of the

prevailing system. Belinsky spoke with this accent because this kind

of harshness was natural to him, because he was widely-read but halfeducated, violently emotional, and unrestrained by conventional breeding or a naturally moderate temper, liable to storms of moral

indignation, constantly boiling and protesting and crying out against

iniquity or falsehood without regard to time or place or company.

His followers adopted his manner because they were the party of the

tnragls, and this became the traditional accent of the new truth which

had to be spoken with anger, with a sense of freshly suffered insult.

In this sense the real heir of Belinsky is the 'nihilist' Bazarov in

Turgenev's Fathers and Children. When the cultivated but insufferable uncfe in that novel, who stands for elegant manners and Pushkin and an aesthetic view of life (with which Turgenev himself feels to

some degree identified, although not without a sense of guilt), enquires

why the dissection of frogs and the other sordid paraphernalia of

modern anatomy should be regarded as so supremely interesting or

important, Bazarov replies with deliberate harshness and arrogance

that this is so because they are 'true'. This kind of violent houtade,

asserting the primacy of the material facts of life and nature, became

the o�cial battle cry of the rebellious section of the intelligentsia,

and it became a duty not merely to tell the unpalatable truth but to

say it as loudly, as harshly, as disagreeably as possible, to trample with

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excessive brutality upon the delicate aesthetic values of the older

generation, to employ shock tactics. The enemy was numerous,

powerful, and well-entrenched, and therefore the cause of truth could

not triumph without wholesale destruction of his defence works, however valuable or attractive they might be in themselves. Belinsky did not himself develop this attitude to its fullest and most destructive

extent, although Bakunin had begun to do so in his lifetime; he was

too sensitive to artistic experience as such, too deeply under the spell

of literary genius, whether it arne from a radial or a reactionary

source, and too honest to practise ruthlessness for its own sake. But the

unbending, puritanical attitude to the truth, and particularly the

passion for the seamy, the unmentionable side of everything, the

insistence on asserting it at whatever cost, at whatever sacrifice of

literary or social amenities, and consequently a certain exaggerated

emphasis on angular, blunt, unambiguous terms calculated to provoke

some kind of sharp reaction-that came from him and him alone, and

it altered the style and content of the great political and artistic controversies of the hundred years and more since his death.

In the polite, elegant, spirited, gay, socially accomplished society

of the intellectuals of Moscow and Petersburg he continued to speak,

indeed at times to shout, in his own dissonant idiom, and remained

independent, violent, maladjusted, and, indeed, what later came to be

called 'class-conscious', to the end of his days; and he was felt to be

a profoundly disturbing figure for precisely this reason, an unassimilable outsider, a dervish, a moral fanatic, a man whose unbridled behaviour threatened the accepted conventions upon which a civilised

literary and artistic world rested. He secured this independence at a

cost; he over-developed the harsher side of his nature, and sometimes

ftung off needlessly crude judgments, he was too intolerant of refinement and fastidiousness as such, too suspicious of the merely beautiful, and was sometimes artistically and morally blinded by the violence of

his own moral dogmatism. But his individuality was so strong, the

power of his words so great, his motives so pure and so intense, that

(as I said before) the very roughness and clumsiness of his style created

its own tradition of literary sincerity. This tradition of protest and

revolt is of a quality wholly different from that of the well-born and

well-bred radicals of the 1 84os who shook and in the end destroyed

the classical aristocratic fa�e of the 'Augustan age' of Russian

literature. The circle-or the two overlapping circles-in which he

moved, in his day still consisted principally of the sons of land-owning

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squires. But i n due course this aristocratic opposition gave way to

more violent figures drawn from the middle class and the proletariat.

Of these latter Belinsky is the greatest and most direct ancestor.

Those left-wing writers of a later day inevitably tended to imitate

the defects of his qualities, and in particular the brutal directness and

carelessness of his diction as a measure of their own contempt for the

careful and often exquisite taste of the polite belles lettres against which

they were in such hot rebellion. But whereas the literary crudities of

such radical critics of the 6os as Chernyshevsky or Pisarev were

deliberate-a conscious weapon in the war for ;naterialism and the

natural sciences, and against the ideals of pure art, refinement, and the

cultivation of aesthetic, non-utilitarian attitudes to personal and social

questions- Belinsky's case is more painful and more interesting. He

was not a crude materialist, and certainly not a utilitarian. He believed

in his critical calling as an end valuable in itself. He wrote as he spokein shapeless, over-long, awkward, hurrying, tangled sentences-only because he possessed no better means of expression; because that was

the natural medium in which he felt and thought.

Let me remind you once again that Russian writing for several

decades, before and after Push kin, practised, as it was, almost exclusively

by the 'awakened' members of the upper and upper middle class, drew

on foreign, principally French and later German, sources, and was

marked with an altogether exceptional sensibility to style and subtlety

of feeling. Belinsky's preoccupations, for all his insight into the process

of artistic creation, were predominantly social and moral. He was a

preacher, he preached with fervour, and could not always control the

tone and accent of his utterance. He wrote, as he spoke, with a grating,

occasionally shrill intonation, and Pushkin's friends-aesthetes and

mandarins- instinctively recoiled from this noisy, frantically excited,

half-educated vulgarian. Belinsky, whose admiration of their magnificent achievement was wholehearted and boundless, felt (as so often) wounded and socially humiliated. But he could not alter his

nature, nor could he alter or modify or pass over the truth as he saw_

it, painfully, but, from time to time, with overwhelming clearness.