Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

His pride was great, and he was dedicated to a cause; the cause was

that of the unadorned truth, and in her service he would live and die.

The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, the Arz.amas group as

they were called, despite radical ideas acquired abroad in the victorious

war against Napoleon, despite the Decembrist interlude, was on the

whole conservative, if not always politically, yet in social habits and

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temper; it was connected with the Court and the Army and deeply

patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, a sin

against the light of science and education, was convinced that Russia

had more to learn from the technologically progressive west than to

teach it, that the Slavophil movement was a romantic illusion, and,

in its extreme form, blind nationalistic megalomania, that western arts

and sciences and forms of civilised life offered the first and only hope

of lifting Russia from her backward state. Herzen, Bakunin, Granovsky believed this too, of course. But then they had had a semi-western education, and found it both easy and agreeable to travel and live

abroad and to enter into social and personal relations with civilised

Frenchmen or Germans. Even the Slavophils who spoke of the west

as worthless and decadent were delighted by their visits to Berlin or

Baden-Baden or Oxford or even Paris itself.

Belinsky, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was

emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecutionridden abroad. He found western culture worthy of respect and emulation, but western habits of life were to him personally quite

insufferable. He began to sigh bitterly for home as soon as he had

left his native shore on a sea voyage to Germany; the Sistine Madonna

and the wonders of Paris did not comfort him; after a month abroad he

was almost insane with nostalgia. In a very real sense he embodied

the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life

to a sharper degree than his friends and contemporaries-whether like

Turgenev they felt contented in Germany and Paris and unhappy in

Russia, or, like the Slavophils, wore traditional Russian dress and

secretly preferred a poem by Goethe or a tragedy by Schiller to any

number of ancit:nt Russian ballads or Slav chronicles. T:1is deep inner

conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost

physical, needs, is a characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth

century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became

sharper and more articulate, the contradiction, which tormented

Belinsky, emerged more clearly. The Marxists or agrarian socialists

or anarchists, when they are not noblemen or university professors,

that is to say, to some degree professionally members of an international society, make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the west in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all

its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when

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they are forced to emigrate, find life abroad more agonising than other

exiles. Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Lavrov were by birth gentlemen,

and lived abroad, if not happily, at any rate without becoming embittered specifically by contact with it. Herz.en did not greatly love Switzerland and he disliked Twickenham and London a great deal,

but he preferred either to St Petersburg under Nicholas I, and he was

happy in the society of his French and Italian friends. Turgenev

seemed more than contented on Madame Viardot's estate at Bougival.

But Belinsky can no more be thought of as a voluntary emigre than

Dr Johnson or Cobbett. He stormed and ranted and denounced the

most sacrosanct Russian institutions, but he did not leave his country.

And although he must have known that imprisonment and slow and

painful death were inevitable if he persisted, he did not, and obviously

could not for a moment, contemplate emigrating beyond the frontiers

of the Russian Empire: the Slavophils and the reactionaries were the

enemy, but the battle could be fought only on native soil. He could

not be silent and he would not go abroad. His head was with the west,

but his heart and his ill-kept body were with the mass of inarticulate

peasants and small traders-the 'poor folk' of Dostoevsky, the inhabitants of the teeming world of Gogol's terrible comic imagination.

Speaking of the Westerners' attitude to the Slavophils, Herz.en said :

Yes, we were their opponents, but very peculiar ones. We had only

ont love, but it did not takt tht samt form.

From our earliest years, we were possessed by one powerful,

unaccountable, physiological, passionate feeling, which they took

for memory of the past, we for a vision of the future-a feeling of

love, limitless, embracing all our being, love for the Russian people,

the Russian way of life, the Russian type of mind. We, like Janus

or the double-headed eagle, looked in opposite directions, while ont

htart beat in us all.

Belinsky was not torn between incompatible ideals. He was an

integrated personality in the sense that he believed in his own feelings,

and was therefore free from the self-pity and the sentimentality which

spring from indulgence in feelings which one does not respect in

oneself. But there was a division within him which arose from a

simultaneous admiration for western values and ideals, and a profound

lack of sympathy with, indeed dislike and lack of respect for, the

characters and form of life of the western bourgeoisie and typical

western intellectuals. This ambivalence of feeling, created by history-

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by the social and psychological conditions, which formed the Russian

intellectuals in the nineteenth century- was inherited by and became

prominent in the next generation of radical intellectuals- in Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov, in the populist movement, in the assassins of Alexander II, and indeed in Lenin too, Lenin who could not be

accused of ignoring or despising the contributions of western culture,

but felt far more alien in London or Paris than the more 'normal'

type of international exile. To some degree this peculiar amalgam of

love and hate is still intrinsic to Russian feelings about Europe: on

the one hand, intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate

and excel; on the other, emotional hostility, suspicion, and contempt, a

sense of being clumsy, dt trop, of being outsiders; leading, as a result,

to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and

aggressive flouting of, western values. No visitor to the Soviet Union

can have failed to remark something of this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the west as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient, and successful :

but also as being cramped, cold, mean, calculating, and fenced in,

without capacity for large views or generous emotion, for feeling which

must, at times, rise too high and overflow its banks, for heedless selfabandonment in response to some unique historical challenge, and consequently condemned never to know a rich flowering of life.

This spontaneity of feeling and passionate idealism are in themselves sufficient to distinguish Belinsky from his more methodical disciples. Unlike later radicals, he was not himself a utilitarian, least

of all where art was concerned. Towards the end of his life he pleaded

for a wider application of science, and more direct expression in art.

But he never believed that it was the duty of the artist to prophesy

or to preach- to serve society directly by telling it what to do, by

providing slogans, by putting its art in the service of a specific programme. This was the view of Chernyshevsky and N ekrasov in the sixties; of Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky and Soviet critics today.

Belinsky, like Gorky, believed in the duty of the artist to tell the

truth as he alone, being uniquely qualified to see and to utter, sees it

and can say it; that this is the whole duty of a writer whether he be a

thinker or an artist. Moreover he believed that since man lives in

society, and is largely made by society, this truth must necessarily be

largely social, and that, for this reason, all forms of insulation and

escape from environment must, to that degree, be falsifications of

the truth, and treason to it. For him the man and the artist and the

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citizen are one; and whether you write a novel, o r a poem, or a work

of history or philosophy, or an article in a newspaper, or compose a

symphony or a picture, you are, or should be, expressing the whole

of your nature, not merely a professionally trained part of it, and you

are morally responsible as a man for what you do as an artist. You

must always bear witness to the truth, which is one and indivisible,

in every act and in every word. There are no purely aesthetic truths

or aesthetic canons. Truth, beauty, morality, are attributes of life and

cannot be abstracted from it, and what is intellectually false or morally

ugly cannot be artistically beautiful, or vice versa. He believed that

human existence was-or should be -a perpetual and desperate war

between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, in which no man

had the right to be neutral or have relations with the enemy, least of

all the artist. He declared war on the official nationalists because they

suppressed and distorted or coloured the facts: and this was thought

unpatriotic. He denounced copybook sentiments, and with a certain

brutality of expression tried to formulate the crude truth behind them,

and that was thought cynical. He admired first the German romantics,

then only their radical wing, and then the French socialists, and was

thought subversive. He told the Slavophils that inner self-improvement

and spiritual regeneration cannot occur on an empty stomach, nor in

a society which lacks social justice and suppresses elementary rights,

and this was thought materialistic.

His life and personality became a myth. He lived as an idealised,

severe, and morally immaculate figure in the hearts of so many of

his contemporaries that, after mention of his name was once again

tolerated by the authorities, they vied with each other in composing

glowing epitaphs to his memory. He established the relation of literature to life in a manner which even writers not at all sympathetic to his point of view, such as Leskov and Goncharov and Turgenev, all

of whom in some sense pursued the ideal of pure art, were forced to

recognise ; they might reject his doctrine, but they were forced by

the power of his invisible presence into having to settle accounts with

him-if they did not, like Dostoevsky or Gogo!, follow him, they at