Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Rousseau, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, and believed that

man was born innocent, and had been ruined by his own bad institutions; especially by what passed for education among civilised men.

Like Rousseau again, he put the blame for this process of decadence

largely on the intellectuals-the self-appointed elites of experts, sophisticated coteries remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life. These men are damned because they have all but lost the

most precious of all human possessions, the capacity with which all

men are born-to see the truth, the immutable, eternal truth which

only charlatans and sophists represent as varying in different circumstances and times and places- the truth which is visible fully only to the innocent eye of those whose hearts have not been corrupted children, peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride. the simple, the good. Education, as the west understands it, ruins innocence. That

is why children resist it bitterly and instinctively: that is why it has to

be rammed down their throats, and, like all coercion and violence,

maims the victim and at times destroys him beyond redress. Men crave

for truth by nature; therefore true education must be of such a kind

that children and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorb it readily

and eagerly. But to understand this, and to discover how to apply this

knowledge, the educated must put away their intellectual arrogance,

and make a new beginning. They must purge their minds of theories,

of false, quasi-scientific analogies between the world of men and the

world of animals, or of men and inanimate things. Only then will they

be able to re-establish a personal relationship with the uneducated-a

relationship which only humanity and love can achieve.

In modern times only Rousseau, and perhaps Dickens, seem to him

to have seen this. Certainly the people's condition will never be

improved until not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but the 'progressists',

as Tolstoy called them, the vain and doctrinaire intelligentsia, are

knows what the previous generations have thought, whereas they do not

know what future generations would think. The equality is between the

teacher and the taught; this desire for equality on the part of both is itself

for him the spring of progress- progress in the sense of'advance in knowledge'

of what men are and what they should do.

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'prised off the people's necks' -the common people's, and the children's

too. So long as fanatical theorists bedevil education, little is to be hoped

for. Even the old-fashioned village priest-so Tolstoy maintains in

one of his early tracts-was less harmful : he knew little and was clumsy,

idle, and stupid; but he treated his pupils as human beings, not as

scientists treat specimens in a laboratory; he did what he could; he

was often corrupt, ill-tempered, unjust, but these were human­

'natural' -vices, and therefore their effects, unlike those of machinemade modern instructors, inflicted no permanent injury.

With these ideas it is not surprising to find that Tolstoy was personally happier among the Slavophil reactionaries. He rejected their ideas; but at least they seemed to him to have some contact with

reality-the land, the peasants, traditional ways of life. At least they

believed in the primacy of spiritual values and the futility of trying

to change men by changing the more superficial sides of their life

by political or constitutional reform. But the Slavophils also believed

in the Orthodox Church, in the unique historical destiny of the Russian

people, the sanctity of history as a divinely ordained process, and therefore the justification of many absurdities because they were native and ancient, and therefore instruments in the divine tactic; they lived

by a Christian faith in the great mystical body-at once community

and church-of the generation of the faithful, past, present, and yet

unborn. Intellectually Tolstoy repudiated this, temperamentally he

responded to it all too strongly. He understood well only the nobility

and the peasants; and the former better than the latter; he shared

many of the instinctive beliefs of his country neighbours; like them

he had a natural aversion to all forms of middle-class liberalism: the

bourgeoisie scarcely appears in his novels. His attitude to parliamentary

democracy, the rights of women, universal suffrage, was not very

different from that of Cobbett or Carlyle or Proudhon or D. H.

Lawrence. He shared deeply the Slavophil suspicions of all scientific

and theoretical generalisations as such, and this created a bridge which

made personal relations with the Moscow Slavophils congenial to

him. But his intellect was not at one with his instinctive convictions.

As a thinker he had profound affinities with the eighteenth-century

philosopher. Like them he looked upon the patriarchal Russian state

and Church, which the Slavophils defended, as organised and hypocritical conspiracies. Like the great thinkers of the Enlightenment he looked for values not in history, nor in the sacred missions of nations

or cultures or churches, but in the individual's own personal experience.

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R U S S IAN TH INKERS

Like them, too, ht! bdieved in eternal (and not in historically evolving)

truths and values, and rejected with both hands the romantic notion of

race or nation or culture as creative agents, still more the Hegelian

conception of history as the self-realisation of self-perfecting reason

incarnated in men or in movements or in institutions (ideas which

had deeply influenced his generation) -all his life he looked on this as

cloudy metaphysical nonsense.

This clear, cold, uncompromising realism is quite explicit in the

notes and diaries and letters of his early life. The reminiscences of

those who knew him as a boy or as a student in the University of

Kazan reinforce this impression. His character was deeply conservative, with a streak of caprice and irrationality; but his mind remained calm, logical, and unswerving; he followed the argument easily and

fearlessly to whatever extreme it led him -a typically, and sometimes

fatally, Russian combination of qualities. What did not satisfy his

critical sense, he rejected. He left the University of Kazan because

he decided that the professors were incompetent and dealt with trivial

issues. Like Helvetius and his friends in the mid-eighteenth century,

Tolstoy denounced theology, history, the teaching of dead languagesthe entire classical curriculum-as an accumulation of data and rules that no reasonable man could wish to know. History particularly

irritated him as a systematic attempt to answer non-existent questions

with all the real issues carefully left out: 'history is like a deaf man

replying to questions which nobody puts to him', he announced to

a startled fellow-student, while they were both locked in the university detention room for some minor act of insubordination. The first extended statement of his full 'ideological' position belongs to the

I 86os: the occasion for it was his decision to compose a treatise on

education. All his intellectual strength and all his prejudice went into

this attempt.

In 1 86o, Tolstoy, then thirty-two years old, found himself in one

of his periodic moral crises. He had acquired some fame as a writer:

Sebastopol, Childhood, Adolescence and Youth, two or three shorter tales,

had been praised by the critics. He was on terms of friendship with

some of the most gifted of an exceptionally talented generation of

writers in his country-Turgenev, Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev,

Pisemsky, Fet. His writing struck everyone by its freshness, sharpness,

marvellous descriptive power, and the precision and originality of its

images. His style was at times criticised as awkward and even barbarous; but he was unquestionably the most promising of the younger 2.42

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prose writers; he had a future; yet his literary friends felt reservations

about him. He paid visits to the literary salons, both right- and leftwing (political divisions had always existed and were becoming sharper in Petersburg and Moscow), but he seemed at ease in none of them.

He was bold, imaginative, independent. But he was not a man of

letters, not fundamentally concerned with problems of literature and

writing, still less of writers; he had wandered in from another, less

intellectual, more aristocratic and more primitive world. He was a

well-born dilettante; but that was nothing new: the poetry of Push kin

and his contemporaries, unequalled in the history of Russian literature,

had been created by amateurs of genius. It was not his origin but his

unconcealed indifference to the literary life as such -to the habits or

problems of professional writers, editors, publicists-that made his

friends among the men of letters feel uneasy in his presence. This

worldly, clever young officer could be exceedingly agreeable; his love

for writing was genuine and very deep; but at literary gatherings he

was contemptuous, formidable and reserved; he did not dream of

opening his heart in a milieu dedicated to intimate, unending selfrevelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, disconcerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He no longer, it was true, lived the life of an

aristocratic officer. The wild nights on which the young radicals looked

with hatred and contempt as characteristic of the dissipated habits of

the reactionary jeunesse diJree no longer amused him. He had married

and settled down, he was in love with his wife, and became for a time

a model (if occasionally exasperating) husband. But he did not trouble

to conceal the fact that he had far more respect for all forms of real

life-whether of the free Cossacks in the Caucasus, or that of the rich

young Guards officers in Moscow with their race-horses and balls

and gypsies- than for the world of books, reviews, critics, professors,

political discussions, and talk about ideals, opinions, and literary values.

Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrelsome and at times unexpectedly

savage; with the result that his literary friends treated him with

nervous respect, and, in the end, drew away from him; or perhaps he

abandoned them. Apart from the poet Fet, who was an eccentric and

deeply conservative country squire himself, Tolstoy had no intimates

among the writers of his own generation. His breach with Turgenev

is well known. He was even remoter from the other litterateurs; he

liked Nekrasov better than his poetry; but then Nekrasov was an

editor of genius and admired and encouraged Tolstoy from his earliest

beginnings.

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The sense o f the contrast between life and literature haunted

Tolstoy. It made him doubt his own vocation as a writer. Like other

young Russians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by

the appalling condition of the peasants. Mere reflection or denunciation seemed to him a way of evading action. He must act, he must start with his own estate. Like the eighteenth-century radicals he