Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

altar-happiness, friendship, love, peace, moral and intellectual certainty, and, in the end, his life. And all she gave him in return was doubt, insecurity, self-contempt and insoluble contradictions.

In this sense, although he would have repudiated this violently, he

is a martyr and a hero-perhaps the most richly gifted of all-in the

tradition of European enlightenment. This seems a paradox; but then

his entire life bears witness to the proposition to the denial of which

his last years were dedicated: that the truth is seldom wholly simple

or clear, or as obvious as it may sometimes seem to the eye of the

common observer.

1 Some Marxist critics, notably Lukacs, represent these contradictions u

the expression in art of the crisis in Russian feudalism and in particular in

the condition of the peasants whO&e predicament Tolstoy is held to reflect.

This seems to me an over-optimistic view: the destruction of Tolstoy's world

should have made his dilemmu obsolete. The reader can judge for himself

whether this is so.

Fathers and Children

T U R G E N E V A N D T H E LI B E R A L

P R E D I C A M E N T

You do not, I see, quite undentand the Ruaaian public. Ita

character is determined by the condition of Russian society,

which contain11, imprisoned within it, fresh forces seething

and bunting to break out; but crushed by heavy repression

and unable to escape, they produce gloom, bitter depression, apathy. Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censonhip, there is still o.ome life and forward movement.

This is why the writer's calling enjoys such respect among

u11, why literary success is so r:uy here even when there ia

little talent . • . This is why, especially amongst us, univenal attention ia paid • • . to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's

gifts • . . The public • . • sees in Russian writen its only

leaden, defenden and savioun from dark autocracy,

Orthodozy and the national way of life • • • 1

Vissarion Belinsky (0�" Lmtr '' G'gel, 1 5 July 1 84-7)

O N 9 October 1 883 Ivan Turgenev was buried, as he had wished.

in St Petersburg. near the grave of hi.s admired friend. the critic

• Belinsky's words-s•motltrz!Jtlflit, prtlfi()J/tlflit ; flllrDJ,,sl' -echo the

official patriotic formula invented by a Minister of Education early in the

reign of Nicholas I. The last of these words-flllrotlfloJI'-was evidendy intended

as the Russian equivalent of Yollstum; it was used in thil context to contrat

the traditional 'folkways' of the common people with the imported, 'arti6cial'

constructions of'wiaeacres' inJluenced by western enlightenment. In practice

it connoted official patriotism as well as such institutions as serfdom, the

hierarchy of estates, and the duty of implicit obedience to the Emperor and

his Government. Belinsky'• letter is a bitter indictment of Gogol for uaing his

genius 'sincerely or insincerely' to serve the cause of obecurantiam and reaction. It was on the charge of reading the letter at a secret meeting of a aubvenive group that Dostoevsky wu arrC:sted and condemned to death.

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Visarion Belinsky. His body was brought from Paris after a brief

ceremony near the Gare du Nord, at which Ernest Renan and Edmond

About delivered appropriate addres5e5. The burial service took place

in the presence of representative$ of the Imperial Government, the

intelligentsia, and workers' organisations, perhaps the first and last

occasion on which these groups peacefully met in Russia. The times

were troubled. The wave of terrorist acts had culminated in the

assassination of Alexander II two years earlier; the ringleaders of the

conspiracy had been hanged or sent to Siberia, but there was still

great unrest, especially among students. The Government feared that

the funeral procession might turn into a political demonstration. The

press received a secret circular from the Ministry of the Interior

instructing it to print only ofticial information about the funeral

without disclosing that any such instructions had been received.

Neither the St Petersburg municipality nor the workers' organisations

were pennitted to identify themselves in the inscriptions on their

wreaths. A literary gathering at which Tolstoy was to have spoken

about his old friend and rival was cancelled by government order. A

revolutionary leaflet was distributed during the funeral procession, but

no official notice of this was taken, and the occasion seems to have

passed off without incident. Yet these precautions, and the uneasy

abnosphere in which the funeral was conducted, may surprise those

who see Turgenev as Henry James or George Moore or Maurice

Baring saw him, and as most of his readers perhaps see him still: as a

writer of beautiful lyrical prose, the author of nostalgic idylls of

country life, the degiac poet of the last enchanbnents of decaying

country houses and of their ineffective but irresistibly attractive

inhabitants, the incomparable story-teller with a marvellous gift for

describing nuances of mood and feeling, the poetry of nature and of

love, gifts which have given him a place among the foremost writers

of his time. In the French memoirs of the time he appears as It douz

gltmt, as his friend Edmond de Goncoun had called him, the good

giant, gende, charming, infinitely agreeable, an entrancing talker,

known as 'The Siren' to some of his Russian companions, the admired

friend of Flauben and Daudet, George Sand and Zola and Mau�t,

the most welcome and delightful of all the hobituls of the s11/rm of

his intimate life-long companion, the singer Pauline Viardot. Yet the

Russian Government had some grounds for its fears. They had not

welcomed Turgenev's visit to Russia, more particularly his meetings

with students, two years before, and had found a way of.conveying

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this to him in unambiguous terms. Audacity was not among his

attributes; he cut his visit short and returned to Paris.

The Government's nervousness is not surprising, for Turgenev was

something more than a psychological observer and an exquisite stylist.

Like virtually every major Russian writer of his time, he was, all his

life, profoundly and painfully concerned with his·country's condition

and destiny. His novels constitute the best account of the social and

political development of the small, but influential, elite of the liberal

and radical Russian youth of his day -of it and of its critics. His books,

from the point of view of the authorities in St Petersburg, were by

no means safe. Yet, unlike his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and

Dostoevsky, he was not a preacher and did not wish to thunder at

his generation. He was concerned, above all, to enter into, to understand, views, ideals, temperaments, both those which he found sympathetic and those by which he was puzzled or repelled. Turgenev possessed in a highly developed form what Herder called Einfiihlen

(empathy), an ability to enter into beliefs, feelings and attitudes alien

and at times acutely antipathetic to his own, a gift which Renan had

emphasised in his eulogy;1 indeed, some of the young Russian revolutionaries freely conceded the accuracy and justice of his portraits of them. During much of his life he was painfully preoccupied with the

controversies, moral and political, social and personal, which divided

the educated Russians of his day; in particular, the profound and

bitter conflicts between Slavophil nationalists and admirers of the west,

conservatives and liberals, liberals and radicals, moderates and fanatics,

realists and visionaries, above all between old and young. He tried to

stand aside and see the scene objectively. He did not always succeed.

But because he was an acute and responsive observer, self-critical and

self-effacing both as a man and as a writer, and, above all, because he

was not anxious to bind his vision upon the reader, to preach, to

convert, he proved a better prophet than the two self-centred, angry

literary giants with whom he is usually compared, and discerned the

birth of social issues which have grown world-wide since his day.

Many years after Turgenev's death the radical novelist Vladimir

Korolenko, who declared himself a 'fanatical' admirer, remarked that

Turgenev 'irritated . . . by touching painfully the most exposed nerves

of the live issues of the day'; that he excited passionate love and

1 For the text of the Discours delivered on 1 October 1 883 see I. Tourgut!neff, Otuflm JmriJrts, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1 88 5), pp. 297-302.

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respect and violent criticism, and 'was a storm centre . . . yet he knew

the pleasures of triumph too; he understood others, and others understood him'.1 It is with this relatively neglected aspect of Turgenev's writing, which speaks most directly to our own time, that I intend to

deal.

I

By temperament Turgenev was not politically minded. Nature, personal relationships, quality of feeling- these are what he understood best, these, and their expression in art. He loved every manifestation

of art and of beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done. The conscious

use of art for ends extraneous to itself, ideological, didactic or utilitarian, and especially as a deliberate weapon in the class war, as demanded by the radicals of the I 86os, was detestable to him. He was

often described as a pure aesthete and a believer in art for art's sake,

and was accused of escapism and lack of civic sense, then, as now,

regarded in the view of a section of Russian opinion as being a despicable form of irresponsible self-indulgence. Yet these descriptions do not fit him. His writing was not as deeply and passionately committed

as that of Dostoevsky after his Siberian exile, or of the later Tolstoy,

but it was sufficiently concerned with social analysis to enable both

the revolutionaries and their critics, especially the liberals among them,

to draw ammunition from his novels. The Emperor Alexander II,

who had once admired Turgenev's early work, ended by looking upon

him as his hlte noire.

In this respect Turgenev was typical of his time and his class. More

sensitive and scrupulous, less obsessed and intolerant than the great

tormented moralists of his age, he reacted just as bitterly against the

horrors of the Russian autocracy. In a huge and backward country,

where the number of educated persons was very small and was divided

by a gulf from the vast majority of their fellow-men-they could

scarcely be described as citizens-living in conditions of unspeakable

poverty, oppression and ignorance, a major crisis of public conscience

was bound sooner or later to arise. The facts are familiar enough: the

Napoleonic wars precipitated Russia into Europe, and thereby, inevitably, into a more direct contact with western enlightenment than had previously been permitted. Army officers drawn from the land-1 Quoted from V. G. Korolenko's anicle '1. A. Goncharov i "molodoe