Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

notion-the contrast between nature and artifice, truth and invention.

When, for instance, in the I 89os he laid down conditions of excellence

in art (in the course of an introduction to a Russian translation of

Maupassant's stories), he demanded of all writers, in the first place

the possession of sufficient talent; in the second that the subject itself

must be morally important; and finally that they must truly love (what

was worthy of love) and hate (what was worthy of hate) in what they

describe- 'commit' themselves-retain the- direct moral vision of childhood, and not maim their natures by practising self-imposed, selflacerating and always illusory impartiality and detachment-or, still worse, deliberate perversion of 'natural' values. Talent is not given

equally to all men; but everyone can, if he tries, discover eternal,

unchanging attributes-what is good and what is bad, what is important

and what is trivial. Only false-'made-up'-theories delude men and

writers about this, and so distort their lives and creative activity.

Tolstoy applies his criterion literally, almost mechanically. Thus

Nekrasov, according to him, treated subjects of profound importance,

and possessed superb skill as a writer; but his attitude towards his

suffering peasants and crushed idealists, .-emained chilly and unreal.

Dostoevsky's subjects lack nothing in seriousness, and his concern is

profound and genuine; but the first condition is unfulfilled : he is

diffuse and repetitive; he does not know how to tell the truth clearly

and then to stop. Turgenev, on the other hand, is judged to be both

an excellent writer and to stand in a real, morally adequate, relationship to his subjects; but he fails on the second count : the subjects are too circumscribed and trivial -and for this no degree of integrity or

skill can compensate. Content determines form, never form content;

and if the content is too small or trivial, nothing will save the work of

the artist. To hold the opposite of this-to believe in the primacy of

form-is to sacrifice truth; to end by producing works that are con-

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trived. There is no harsher word in Tolstoy's entire critical vocabulary

than 'made-up', indicating that the writer did not truly experience or

imagine, but merely 'coinposed'-'made up'-that which he is purporting to describe.

So, too, Tolstoy maintained that Maupassant, whose gifts he

admired greatly, betrayed his genius precisely owing to false and

vulgar theories of this kind; yet he remained, none the less, a good

writer to the degree to which, like Balaam, although he might have

meant to curse virtue, he could not help discerning what was good;

and this perception attracted his love to it, and forced him against his

own will towards the truth. Talent is vision, vision reveals the truth,

truth is eternal and objective. To see the truth about nature or about

conduct, to see it directly and vividly as only a man of genius (or a

simple human being or a child) can see it, and then to deny or tamper

with the vision in cold blood, no matter for the sake of what, is

monstrous, unnatural; a symptom of a deeply diseased character.

·

Truth is discoverable: to follow it is to be good, inwardly sound,

harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or

composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the

educated minority-what Tolstoy calls the professors, the barons, and

the bankers-are opposed to those of the majority-the peasants, the

poor; each side is indifferent to, or mocks, the values of the other.

Even those who, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin, realise the

spuriousness of the values of the professors, barons, ·and bankers, and

the moral decay in which their false education has involved them, even

those who are truly contrite cannot, despite Slavophil pretensions, go

native and 'merge' with the mass of the common people. Are they too

corrupt ever to recover their innocence? Is their case hopeless? Or

can it be that civilised men have acquired (or discovered) certain true

values of their own, values which barbarians and children may know

nothing of, but which they, the civilised, cannot lose or forget, even if,

by some impossible means, they could transform themselves into

peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek?

This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy's

life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns

conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongs to the minority of

barons, bankers, professors. He knows the symptoms of his condition

only too well. He cannot, for example, deny his passionate love for the

music of Mozart or Chopin or the poetry of Tyutchev or Pushkin,

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the ripest fruits of civilisation. He needs, he cannot do without, the

printed word and all the elaborate· paraphernalia of the culture in

which such lives are lived and such works of art are created. But what

is the use of Pushkin to village boys, when his words are not intelligible

to them? What real benefits has the invention of printing brought the

peasants? We are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate societies

('that is, make them more corrupt'), that it was the written word that

has promoted the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy denies

this: the government would have done the same without books or

pamphlets. Pushkin's Boris Godunov pleases only him, Tolstoy: but

to the peasants it means nothing. The triumphs of civilisation? The

telegraph tells him about his sister's health, or about the prospects of

King Otto I of Greece; but what benefits do the masses gain from it?

Yet it is they who pay and have always paid for it all; they know this

well. When peasants kill doctors in the 'cholera riots' because they

regard them as poisoners, what they do is no doubt wrong, but these

murders are no accident: the instinct which tells the peasants who

their oppressors are is sound, and the doctors belong to that class.

When Wanda Landowska played to the villagers of Yasnaya Polyana,

the great majority of them remained unresponsive. Yet can it be

doubted that it is the simple people who lead the least broken lives,

immeasurably superior to the warped and tormented lives of the rich

and educated?

The common people, Tolstoy asserts in his early educational tracts,

are self-subsistent not only materially but spiritually-folksong, the

Iliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself, and are therefore

intelligible to all men everywhere, as the marvellous poem Silmtium

by Tyutchev, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Symphony is not. If

there is an ideal of man, it lies not in the future, but in the past.

Once upon a time there was the Garden of Eden and in it dwelt the

uncorrupted human soul as the Bible and Rousseau conceived it, and

then came the Fall, corruption, suffering, falsification. It is mere

blindness (Tolstoy says over and over again) to believe, as liberals or

socialists-the progressives-believe, that the golden age is still before

us, that history is the story of improvement, that material advance in

natural science or material skills coincides with real moral advance.

The truth is the reverse of this.

The child is closer to the ideal harmony than the grown man, and

the simple peasant than the tom, 'alienated', morally and spiritually

unanchored and self�estructive parasites who form the civilised elite.

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From this doctrine springs Tolstoy's notable anti-individualism: and

in particular his diagnosis of the individual's will as the source of

misdirection and perversion of 'natural' human tendencies, and hence

the conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer's doctrine of the

will as the source of frustration) that to plan, organise, rely on science,

try to create rational patterns of life in accordance with rational

theories, is to swim against the stream of nature, to dose one's eyes

to the saving truth within us, to torture facts to fit artificial schemata,

and torture human beings to fit social and economic systems against

which their natures cry out. From the same source, too, comes the

obverse of this: Tolstoy's faith in an intuitively grasped direction of

things as not merely inevitable, but objectively-providentially-good;

and therefore belief in the need to submit to it: his quietism.

This is one aspect of his teaching-the most famous, the most

central idea of the Tolstoyan movement-and it runs through all his

works, imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossadts and Family

Happiness to his last religious tracts. This is the doctrine which the

liberals and Marxists condemned. It is in this mood that Tolstoy

maintains that to imagine that heroic personalities determine events

is a piece of colossal megalomania and self-deception; his narrative is

designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Tsar Alexander,

or of the aristocratic and bureaucratic society in Anna Kartnina, or of

the judges and official persons in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness

and intellectual impotence of historians and philosophers who try to

explain events by employing concepts like 'power' which is attributed

to great men, or 'influence' ascribed to writers, orators, preacherswords, abstractions which, in his view, explain nothing, being themselves far more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not begin to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations that do not explain are, for

Tolstoy, a symptom of the disruptive and self-inflated intellect, the

faculty that destroys innocence and leads to false ideas and the ruin of

human life.

That is the strain, inspired by Rousseau and present in early

romanticism, which inspired primitivism in art and in life, not in

Russia alone. Tolstoy imagines that he and others can find the path

to the truth about how one should live by observing simple people, by

the study of the gospels.

His other strain is the direct opposite of this. Mikhailovsky says,

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with justice, that Olenin cannot, charmed as he is by the Caucasus

and the Cossack idyll, transform himself into a Lukashka, return to

the childlike harmony, which in his case has long been broken. Levin

knows that if he tried to become a peasant this could only be a grotesque

farce, which the peasants would be the first to perceive and deride; he

and Pierre and Nikolay Rostov know obscurely that in some sense

they have something to give that the peasants have not. Tolstoy tells

the educated reader that the peasant

needs what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour

has given you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to sufferthen give him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in need of it • . .

do not bury in the earth the talent given you by history . . .

Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive. Progress can occur: we