Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

who inspired in him feelings that he found difficult to analyse. 'There

1 The original epigraph to F athrs 1111d Childrtll, which Turgenev later

discarded. See A. Mazon, Mallf�J(rits pllrisit11s d'/rJafl TrmrguiMrJ (Paris,

1930), PP· 6+-S·

FATHERS AND CHILDREN

was', he wrote many years later to a friend, '-please don't laugh-some

sort of fatum, something stronger than the author himself, something

independent of him. I know one thing: I started with no preconceived

idea, no "tendency"; I wrote naively, as if myself astonished at what

was emerging.'1 He said that the central figure of the novel, Bazarov,

was mainly modelled on a Russian doctor whom he met in a train in

Russia. But Bazarov has some of the characteristics of Belinsky too.

Like him, he is the son of a poor army doctor, and he possesses some

of Belinsky's brusqueness, his directness, his intolerance, his liability

to explode at any sign of hypocrisy, of solemnity, of pompous conservative, or evasive liberal, cant. And there is, despite Turgenev's denials, something of the ferocious, militant, anti-aestheticism of

Dobrolyubov too. The central topic of the novel is the confrontation

of the old and young, of liberals and radicals, traditional civilisation

and the new, hanh positivism which has no use for anything except

what is needed by a rational man. Bazarov, a young medical researcher,

is invited by his fellow student and disciple, Arkady Kinanov, to stay

at his father's house in the country. Nikolay Kinanov, the father, is a

gentle, kindly, modest country gentleman, who adores poetry and

nature, and greets his son's brilliant friend with touching courtesy.

Also in the house is Nikolay Kinanov's brother, Pavel, a retired army

officer, a carefully dressed, vain, pompous, old-fashioned dandy, who

had once been a minor lion in the solons of the capital, and is now

living out his life in elegant and irritated boredom. Bazarov scents

an enemy, and takes deliberate pleasure in describing himself and his

allies as 'nihilists', by which he means no more than that he, and those

who think like him, reject everything that cannot be established by

the rational methods of natural science. Truth alone matten: what

cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or

harmful ballast-'romantic rubbish'-which an intelligent man will

ruthlessly eliminate. In this heapofirrational nonsense Bazarov includes

all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement-literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised

assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, of

landownen and serfs. He believes in strength, will-power, energy,

utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear

off masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable

t From a letter to M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

R U S S IAN THINKERS

facts, only useful knowledge, matter. He clashes almost immediatdy

with the touchy, conventional Pavel Kirsanov: 'At present', he tells

him, 'the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny.' 'Everything�'

asks Pavel Kirsanov. 'Everything.' 'What� Not only art, poetry . . . but

even . . . too horrible to utter . . .' 'Everything.' 'So you destroy every-

thing . . . but surely one must build, too?' 'That's not our business • . .

First one must clear the ground.'

The fiery revolutionary agitator Bakunin, who had just then

esaped from Siberia to London, was saying something of this kind :

the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the

ground, before something new can be built upon it; what this is to be

is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries, our business is to demolish.

The new men, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and

exploiters, and its bogus values-these men will know what to do. The

French anarchist Georges Sorel once quoted Marx as saying 'Anyone

who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.'1

This went beyond the position of Turgenev's radical critics of the

Contemporary: they did have a programme of sorts: they were democratic populists. But faith in the people seems just as irrational to Bazarov as the rest of the 'romantic rubbish'. 'Our peasants', he declares, 'are prepared to rob themselves in order to drink themselves blind at the inn.' A man's first duty is to develop his own powers, to be

strong and rational, to create a society in which other rational men

can breathe and live and learn. His mild disciple Arkady suggests to

him that it would be ideal if all peasants lived in a pleasant whitewashed hut, like the head man of their village. 'I have conceived a loathing for this . . . peasant,' Bazarov says, 'I have to work the skin

off my hands for him, and he won't so much as thank me for it;

anyway, what do I need his thanks for? He'll go on living in his

whitewashed hut, while weeds grow out of me . . . ' Arkady is shocked

by such talk; but it is the voice of the new, hard-boiled, unashamed

materialistic egoism. Nevertheless Bazarov is at his ease with peasants;

they are not self-conscious with him even if they think him an odd

sort of member of the gentry. Bazarov spends his afternoon in dissecting

frogs. 'A decent chemist', he tells his shaken host, 'is twenty times

1 Sorel declares that this passage occurs in a letter which, according

to the economist Lujo Brentano, Marx wrote to one of his English friends,

Professor Beesly (RijltxifJns sur Ia rJiolttut, 7th ed. [Paris, 1 930 ], p. 199,

note z). I have not found it in any published collection of Marx's letters.

278

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

more use than any poet.' Arkady, after consulting Bazarov, gently

draws a volume of Pushkin out of his father's hands, and slips into

them BUchner's Kraft und Stoff',! the latest popular exposition of

materialism. Turgenev describes the older Kirsanov walking in his

garden: 'Nikolay Petrovich dropped his head, and passed his hand over

his face. "But to reject poetry," he thought again, "not to have a

feeling for art, for nature . . • " and he cast about him, as if trying to

understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature.' All

principles, Bazarov declares, are reducible to mere sensations. Arkady

asks whether, in that case, honesty is only a sensation. 'You find this

hard to swallowl' says Bazarov. 'No, friend, if you have decided to

knock everything down, you must knock yourself down, too! • . . '

This is the voice of Bakunin and Dobrolyubov : 'one must clear the

ground'. The new culture must be founded on real, that is materialist,

scientific values: socialism is just as unreal and abstract as any other

of the 'isms' imported from abroad. As.for the old aesthetic, literary

culture, it will crumble before the realists, the new, tough-minded

men who can look the brutal truth in the face. 'Aristocracy, liberalism,

progress, principles . . . what a lot of foreign . . . and useless words. A

Russian would not want them as a gift.' Paul Kirsanov rejects this

contemptuously; but his nephew Arkady cannot, in the end, accept it

either. 'You aren't made for our harsh, bitter, solitary kind of life,'

Bazarov tells him, 'you aren't insolent, you aren't nasty, all you have

is the audacity, the impulsiveness of youth, and that is of no use in

our business. Your type, the gentry, cannot get beyond noble humility,

noble indignation, and that is nonsense. You won't, for instance, fight,

and yet you think yourselves terrific. We want to fight . . . Our dust

will eat out your eyes, our dirt will spoil your clothes, you haven't

risen to our level yet, you still can't help admiring yourselves, you

like castigating yourselves, and that bores us. Hand us others-it is

them we want to break. You are a good fellow, but, all the same, you

are nothing but a soft, beautifully bred, liberal boy . . . '

Bazarov, someone once said, is the first Bolshevik; even though he

is not a socialist, there is some truth in this. He wants radical change

and does not shrink from brute force. The old dandy, Pavel Kirsanov,

protests against this: 'Force? There is force in savage Kalmucks and

Mongols, too . . . What do we want it for? . . . Civilisation, its fruits,

are dear to us. And don't tell me they are worthless. The most

1 Turgenev calls it Stoff t111J Krtlft.

,,

279

R U S S IAN T H I N K ERS

miserable dauber . • . the pianist who taps on the keys in a restaurant

. . . they are more useful than you are, because they represent civilisation and not brute Mongol force. You imagine that you are progressive; you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon !' In the end, Bazarov,

against all his principles, falls in love with a cold, clever, well-born

society beauty, is rejected by her, suffers deeply, and not long after

dies as a result of an infection caught while dissecting a corpse in a

village autopsy. He dies stoically, wondering whether his country had

any real need of him and men like him; and his death is bitterly

lamented by his old, humble, loving parents. Bazarov falls because he

is broken by fate, not through failure of will or intellect. 'I conceived

him', Turgenev later wrote to a young student, 'as a sombre figure,

wild, huge, half-grown out of the soil, powerful, nasty, honest, but

doomed to destruction because he still stands only in the gateway to

the future • . .'1 This brutal, fanatical, dedicated figure, with his

unused powers, is represented as an avenger for insulted human

reason; yet, in the end, he is incurably wounded by a love, by a human

passion that he suppresses and denies within himself, a crisis by which

he is humiliated and humanised. In the end, he is crushed by heartless

nature, by what the author calls the cold-eyed goddess Isis, who does

not care for good or evil, or art or beauty, still less for man, the

creature of an hour; he is not saved either· by his egoism or his altruism,

by faith or works, by rational hedonism or puritanical pursuit of duty;

he struggles to assert himself; but nature is indifferent; she obeys her

own inexorable laws.

Fathers and Children was published in the spring of I 862 and caused

the greatest storm among its Russian readers of any novel before or,

indeed, since. What was Bazarov? How was he to be taken? Was he

a positive or a negative figure? A hero or a devil? He is young, bold,

intelligent, strong, he has thrown off the burden of the past, the

melancholy impotence of the 'superfluous men' beating vainly against