Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

t Letter to L. N. Tolstoy, z9 January 1 8 58.

a To Tolstoy, 8 April 18s8.

268

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

novels, from the middle iSsos onwards, are deeply concerned with the

central social and political questions that troubled the liberals of his

generation. His outlook was profoundly and pennanently influenced

by Belinsky's indignant humanism and in particular by his furious

philippics against all that was dark, corrupt, oppressive, false.1 Two

or three years earlier, at the University of Berlin, he had listened to

the Hegelian sermons of the future anarchist agitator Bakunin, who

was his fellow student, sat at the feet of the same Gennan philosophical

master and, as Belinsky had once done, admired Bakunin's dialectical

brilliance. Five years later he met in Moscow and soon became intimate

with the radical young publicist Herzen and his friends. He shared

their hatred of every form of enslavement, injustice and brutality, but

unlike some among them he could not rest comfortably in any doctrine

or ideological system. All that was general, abstract, absolute, repelled

him: his vision remained delicate, sharp, concrete, and incurably

realistic. Hegelianism, right-wing and left-wing, which he had imbibed

as a student in Berlin, materialism, socialism, positivism, about which

his friends ceaselessly argued, populism, collectivism, the Russian

village commune idealised by those Russian socialists whom the

ignominious collapse of the left in Europe in 1 848 had bitterly

disappointed and disillusioned-these came to seem mere abstractions

to him, substitutes for reality, in which many believed, and a few

even tried to live, doctrines which life, with its uneven surface and

irregular shapes of real human character and activity, would surely

resist and shatter if ever a serious effort were made to translate them

into practice. Bakunin was a dear friend and a delightful boon companion, but his fantasies, whether Slavophil or anarchist, left no trace on Turgenev's thought. Herzen was a different matter: he was a

sharp, ironical, imaginative thinker, and in their early years they had

much in common. Yet Herzen's populist socialism seemed to Turgenev

a pathetic fantasy, the dream of a man whose earlier illusions were

killed by the failure of the revolution in the west, but who could

1 'Doubb tormented (Belinsky], robbed him of sleep, food, relendessly

gnawed at him, burnt him, he would not let himself sink into forgetfulness,

did not know fatigue . . • his sincerity affected me too,' he wrote in his

reminiscences with characteristic self-deprecating irony and affection, 'his

fire communicated itself to me, the importance of the topic absorbed me; but

after talking for two to three hours I used to weaken, the frivolity of youth

would take its toll, I wanted to rest, I began to think of a walk, of dinner • • . '

Lilmzlurnyt i zhiuisl.it oospomiflt�fliya (Leningrad, 1934), p. 79·

•'

:169

R U S S I AN T H INKERS

not live long without faith; with his old ideals, social justice, equalitr,

liberal democracy, impotent before the forces of reaction in the west,

he must find himself a new idol to worship: against 'the golden calf'

(to use Turgenev's words) of acquisitive capitalism, he set up 'the

sheepskin coat' of the Russian peasant.

Turgenev understood and sympathised with his friend's cultural

despair. Like Carlyle and Flaubert, like Stendhal and Nietzsche, Ibsen

and Wagner, Herzen felt increasingly asphyxiated in a world in which

all values had become debased. All that was free and dignified and

independent and creative seemed to Herzen to have gone under beneath

the wave of bourgeois philistinism, the commercialisation of life by

corrupt and vulgar dealers in human commodities and their mean and

insolent lackeys who served the huge joint-stock companies called

France, England, Germany; even Italy (he wrote), 'the most poetical

country in Europe', when the 'fat, bespectacled little bourgeois of

genius', Cavour, offered to keep her, could ·not restrain herself and,

deserting both her fanatical lover Mazzini and her Herculean husband

Garibaldi, gave herself to him.1 Was it to this decaying corpse that

Russia was to look as the ideal model? The time was surely ripe for

some cataclysmic transformation- a barbarian invasion from the east

which would clear the air like a healing storm. Against this, Herzen

declared, there was only one lightning conductor-the Russian peasant

commune, free from the taint of capitalism, from the greed and fear

and inhumanity of destructive individualism. Upon this foundation a

new society of free, self-governing human beings might yet be built.

Turgenev regarded all this as a violent exaggeration, the dramatisation of private despair. Of course the Germans were pompous and ridiculous; Louis Napoleon and the profiteers of Paris were odious,

but the civilisation of the west was not crumbling. It was the greatest

achievement of mankind. It was not for Russians, who had nothing

comparable to offer, to mock at it or keep it from their gates. He accused

Herz.en of being a tired and disillusioned man, who after 1 849 was

looking for a new divinity and had found it in the simple Russi.m

peasant. 2 'You erect an altar to this new and unknown God because

almost nothing is known about him, and one can . . . pray and believe

1 A. I. Herzen, 'Kontsy i nachala', First Letter, I 862. Solmmit sochifltflii

'l1 tridtsati tolflallh (Moscow, 19 54-65), vol. 1 6, p. 1 3 8. Later references to

Herzen's works ai:e to this edition.

1 Letter to Herzen, 8 November 1 86z.

FATH ERS AND C H I LDREN

and wait. This God does not begin to do what you expect of him;

this, you say, is temporary, accidental, injected by outside forces; your

God loves and adores that which you hate, hates that which you love;

(he J accepts precisely what you reject on his behalf: you avert your

eyes, you stop your ears . . .'1 'Either you must serve the revolution,

and European ideals as before. Or, if you now think that there is

nothing in all this, you must have the courage to look the devil in

both eyes, plead guilty to the whole of Europe-to its face-and not make

an open or implied exception for some coming Russian Messiah' - least

of all for the Russian peasant who is, in embryo, the worst conservative

of all, and cares nothing for liberal ideas.1 Turgenev's sober realism

never deserted him. He resporided to the faintest tremors of Russian

life; in particular, to the changes of expression on what he called 'the

swiftly altering physiognomy of those who belong to the cultured

section of Russian society'.8 He claimed to do no more than to record

what Shakespeare called the 'form and pressure' of the time. He faithfully described them all-the talkers, the idealists, the fighters, the cowards, the reactionaries, and the radicals-sometimes, as in Smoke,

with biting polemical irony, but, as a rule, so scrupulously, with so

much understanding for all the overlapping sides of every question,

so much unruffled patience, touched only occasionally with undisguised

irony or satire (without sparing his own character and views), that he

angered almost everyone at some time.

Those who still think of him as an uncommitted artist, raised high

above the ideological battle, may be surprised to learn that no one in

the entire history of Russian literature, perhaps of literature in general,

has been so ferociously and continuously attacked, both from the

right and from the left, as Turgenev. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy held

far more violent views, but they were formidable figures, angry

prophets treated with nervous respect even by their bitterest opponents.

Turgenev was not in the least formidable; he was amiable, sceptical,

'kind and soft as wax',� too courteous and too self-distrustful to frighten

anyone. He embodied no clear principles, advocated no doctrine, no

1 ibid. On this topic see Pis'ma K. D. KilfJe/i1111 i I. S. TMrge11�11 l A. /.

Gn-tst11M, ed. M. Dragomanov (Geneva. 1 89: ),)etten byTurgenev for r 86z-J.

• Letter to Herzen, 8 November r 86:.

1 Introduction to the collected novels, r88o, Pol11ot so6ra11ie socAitu11ii i

pise111 (Moscow/Leningrad, 196o-68), 8ocAi11e11iya, vol. r :, p. 303. later

references to Turgenev'a works are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

' See above, p. :67, note 1.

R U SSIAN T H IN K E R S

panacea for the 'accursed questions', as they arne to be called, personal

and social. 'He felt and understood the opposite sides of life,' said

Henry James of him, 'our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, moralistic conventional standards were far away from him . . . half the charm of conversation with him was that one breathed an air in which cant

phrases . . • simply sounded ridiculous.'1 In a country in which readers,

and especially the young, to this day look to writers for moral direction,

he refused to preach. He was aware of the price he would have to pay

for such reticence. He knew that the Russian reader wanted to . be

told what to believe and how to live, expected to be provided with

clearly contrasted values, clearly distinguishable heroes and villains.

When the author did not provide this, Turgenev wrote, the reader

was dissatisfied and blamed the writer, since he found it difficult and

irritating to have to make up his own mind, find his own way. And,

indeed, it is true that Tolstoy never leaves you in doubt about whom

he favours and whom he condemns; Dostoevsky does not conceal

what he regards as the path of salvation. Among these great, tormented

LaocoOns Turgenev remained cautious and sceptical; the reader is left

in suspense, in a state of doubt: central problems are raised, and for the

most part left-it seemed to some a trifle complacently-unanswered.

No society demanded more of its authors than Russia, then or now.

T urgenev was accused of vacillation, temporising, infirmity of purpose,

of speaking with too many voices. Indeed, this very topic obsessed

him. Rudin, Asya, On the Eve, the major works of the 1 Ssos, are

preoccupied with weakness-the failure of men of generous heart,

sincerely held ideals, who remain impotent and give in without a

struggle to the forces of stagnation. Rudin, drawn partly from the

young Bakunin, partly from himself,1 is a man of high ideals, talks

well, fascinates his listeners, expresses views which Turgenev could

accept and defend. But he is made of paper. When he is faced with a

genuine crisis which calls for courage and resolution, he crumples and