Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this)

into the generation of what in Russia came to be called /ishnie lyudi,

'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely

concerned.

These young men have a place of their own in the history of

European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the

class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go

over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.

There is something singularly attractive about men who retained,

throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and

style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar

kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction.

Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a

unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic ed:.�cation tends

to produce. At the same time, they are intellectually on the side of

everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that

which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not

there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate

figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt,

who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the

douceur de Ia vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future,

the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into

being.

Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has described

what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where

there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it

meant to be excited by novel ideas which came drifting in from all

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kinds o f sources, from classical texts an d the old Utopias o f the west,

from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books,

journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in

which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in

one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which

had long become forms of life in the civilised west.

This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast

simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and became a wistful,

gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages

of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and

occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some

other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in

France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or

that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or

nothing could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in

entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair,

becoming self-devouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly

poisoning both themselves and the life round them.

Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no

resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in

1 847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was

that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic

milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men,

to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.

Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good

fortune of those who enter peacefully upon some steady, fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic- young men who have been taught too much, are

too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing

too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and

go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way

and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing. This was a very characteristic

piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in

Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt

towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something

memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with

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him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has

any acquaintance with the modern history of Russia, perhaps the

greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first freethat is i:o say, anti-tsarist- Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.

In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell ( KDIDkol),

he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed,

he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian

Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a journalist of genius,

and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion, although,

of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by

radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor

himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during

the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within

Russia itself-an unheard of phenomenon for an tmtigre-by exposing

abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment

which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist

bureaucracy, at any rate during the I 8 50s and I 86os.

Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public

platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best descri�

tion of him is to be found in the essay from which I have taken my

title-'A Remarkable Decade', by his friend Annenkov. It was written

some twenty years after the events that it records.

I must own [ Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed,

when I first came to know Herzen-by this extraordinary mind

which daned from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness,

with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum

of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea,

that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most

astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of

quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree,

fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a

very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a

. degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by

the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible

fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect

which astonished his audience.

After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the

glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical

and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded

of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but

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also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to

respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry

could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply Red from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them

what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear

Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others . . . who

gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . .

He had a natural gift for cr:ticism-a capacity for exposing and

denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very

early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.

Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and

unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the

predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come

into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.

He lived in Moscow . . . still unknown to the public, but in his

own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous

observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal

the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own,

about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the

privacy of his own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all

innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough,

Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with

his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his

pungent analyses. This is explained by another side of his character.

As if to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took

care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable

inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human

heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive

impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of

existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or

passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.

This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature-suspicion and

denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other-often led to

perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and

sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible

of argument, in its Rames, that up to the very day of his departure

for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and

strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelli-

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gible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this

time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no

malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery.

On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one

of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made

one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem

unplausible to people who did not know him.

With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a

wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem

outward aspect of the sceptic, the :>atirist, under the cover of a most