Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

the bars of the prison house of Russian society. The critic Strakhov in

his review spoke of him as a character conceived on a heroic scale. 1

Many years later Lunacharsky described him as the first 'positive' hero

in Russian literature. Does he then symbolise progress? .Freedom? Yet

1 Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, 26 April I 862.

• 'Ottsy i deti', Yrtmyt�, 1 862 No 4, pp. sB-84. See also his essays on

Turgenev in Kriticlmlit st11t'i o6 I. S. Turgtnltlt i L. N. Toll/om (I86z-Bs)

(St Petersburg, J88S)·

FAT H E RS AND C H I LD R E N

his hatred of art and culture, of the entire world of liberal values, his

cynical asides-does the author mean to hold these up for admiration?

Even before the novel was published his editor, Mikhail Katkov,

protested to Turgenev. This glorification of nihilism, he complained,

was nothing but grovelling at the feet of the young radicals. 'T urgenev',

he said to the novelist's friend Annenkov, 'should be ashamed of

lowering the Rag before a radical', or saluting him as an honourable

soldier.1 Katkov declared that he was not deceived by the author's

apparent objectivity: 'There is concealed approval lurking here . . .

this fellow, Bazarov, definitely dominates the others and does not

encounter proper resistance', and he concluded that what Turgenev

had done was politically dangerous.• Strakhov was more sympathetic.

He wrote that Turgenev, with his devotion to timeless truth and

beauty, only wanted to describe reality, not to judge it. He too, however, spoke of Bazarov as towering over the other characters, and declared that Turgenev might claim to be drawn to him by an

irresistible attraction, but it would be truer to say that he feared him.

Katkov echoes this: 'One gets the impression of a kind of embarrassment in the author's attitude to the hero of his story . . . It is as if the author didn't like him, felt lost before him, and, more than this, was

terrified of him !'1

The attack from the left was a good deal more virulent. Dobrolyubov's successor, Antonovich, accused T urgenev in the Contemporary'

of perpetrating a hitleous and disgusting caricature of the young.

Bazarov was a brutish, cynical sensualist, hankering after wine and

women, unconcerned with the fate of the people; his creator, whatever

his views in the past, had evidently crossed over to the blackest reactionaries and oppressors. And, indeed, there were conservatives who congratulated Turgenev for exposing the horrors of the new, destructive nihilism, and thereby rendering _a public service for which all men of decent feeling must be grateful. But it was the attack from the_

1 /. 8. TurgtntfJ c> c>ospomint�niyt�lll JDflrtmtllllilw, vol. 1, p. 343·

I ibid, PP· 343-4·

a Letter to Turgenev, quoted by him in LittrtiJumyt i z!Jittislit tJospomint�niyt�, P· I sB.

• See M. A. Antonovich, 'Aamodey nashegovremeni', Swrtmtnnil, March

1 862, pp. 6S-I I4, and V. G. Bazanov, 'Turgenev i antinigilisticheskii roman',

K trrtliytl (Petrozavodsk, 1940 ), vol. 4. p. 160. Also V. A. Zelinsky, K ritichslit

rt1z/Jory romt111t1 'Ottsy i tkti' I. S. Turgtllnltl (Moscow, 1 894), and V.

Tukhomitsky, 'Prototipy Bazarova', K prt�t:>tk (Moacow, 1904), pp. 227-85.

•'

:18 1

R U SS IAN THINKERS

left that hurt Turgenev most. Seven years later he wrote to a friend

that 'mud and filth' had been flung at him by the young. He had been

called fool, donkey, reptile, Judas, police agent.1 And again, 'While

some accused me of • • . backwardness, black obscurantism, and

informed me that "my photographs were being burnt amid contemptuous laughter", yet others indignantly reproached me with kowtowing to the . . . young. "You are crawling at Bazarov's feet !" cried one

of my correspondents. "You are only pretending to condemn him.

Actually you scrape and bow to him, you wait obsequiously for the

favour of a casual smile !" • . . A shadow has fallen upon my name.'1

At least one of his liberal friends who had read the manuscript of

Fathers tmd Childrm told him to burn it, since it would compromise

him for ever with the progressives. Hostile caricatures appeared in the

left-wing press, in which Turgenev was represented as pandering to

the fathers, with Bazarov as a leering Mephistopheles, mocking his

disciple Arkady's love for his father. At best, the author was drawn

as a bewildered �gure simultaneously attacked by frantic democrats

from the left and threatened by armed fathers from the right, as he

stood helplessly between them.8 But the left was not unanimous. The

radical critic Pisarev came to Turgenev's aid. He boldly identified

himself with Bazarov and his position. Turgenev, Pisarev wrote,

might be too soft or tired to accompany us, the men of the future;

but he knows that true progress is to be found not in men tied to

tradition, but in active, self-emancipated, independent men, like

Bazarov, free from fantasies, from romantic or religious nonsense.

The author does not bully us, he does not tell us to accept the values

of the 'fathers'. Bazarov is in revolt; he is the prisoner of no theory;

that is his attractive strength; that is what makes for progress and

freedom. Turgenev may wish to tell us that we are on a false path,

but in fact he is a kind of Balaam: he has become deeply attached to

the hero of his novel through the very process of creation, and pins

all his hopes to him. 'Nature is a workshop, not a temple', and we are

workers in it; not melancholy daydreams, but will, strength, intelligence, realism-these, Pisarev declares, speaking through Bazarov, 1 To L. Pietsch, 3 June I 869.

1 'Po povodu OtiiiJrl i tktti' (I 869), LittrtJit11'71Jt i zllittislit oospomi11tJiliyt�,

PP· I S7-9·

a e.g. in the journal Ost1 (I863 No7). See M. M. K.levensky,'lvan Sergeevich

Turgenev v karikaturakh i parodiyakh', Go/os mi11tlf!shgo, I 9 I 8 Nos I-3,

pp. I 8 5-2 I 8, and D11my i pts11i D. D. Mi11t1tflt1 (St Petersburg, I 863).

2.82.

FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

these will find the road. Bazarov, he adds, is what parents today see

emerging in their sons and daughters, sisters in their brothers. They

may be frightened by it, they may be puzzled, but that is where the

road to the future lies.1

Turgenev's familiar friend, Annenkov, to whom he submitted all

his novds for criticism before he published them, saw Bazarov as a

Mongol, a Genghis Khan, a wild beast symptomatic of the savage

condition of Russia, only 'thinly concealed by books from the Leipzig

Fair'.1 Was Turgenev aiming to become the leader of a political

movement? 'The author himself . . . does not know how to take him ..

he wrote, 'as a fruitful force for the future, or as a disgusting boil on

the body of a hollow civilisation, to be removed as rapidly as possible. •a

1 D. I. Pisarev, 'Bazarov' (Russloe slflfiD, 1 862, No 3), PDifiH so!Jranit

sod1i11t11ii (St Petersburg, I4JOI), vol. 2, pp. 379-4-28; and 'Realisty' (1 864-),

ibid., vol. 4. pp. 1-14-6. It is perhaps worth noting for the benefit of those

interested in the history of Russian radical ideas that it was the controversy

about the character of Bazarov that probably inJluenced Chemyshevsky in

creating the character of Rakhmetov in his famous didactic novel 11'/uzl is

lo lit Jont?, published in the following year; but the view that Rakhmetov

is not merely 'the answer' to Bazarov, but a 'positive' version of Turgenev's

hero (e.g. in a recent introduction to one of the English translations of the

novel) is without foundation. Pisarev's self-identification with Bazarov

marks the line of divergence between the rational egoism and potential

elitism of the 'nihilists' of Russ lot slflfiiJ with their neo-Jacobin allies of the

1 86os-culminating in Tkachev and Nechaev-and the altruistic and genuinely

egalitarian socialism of Sflflrtmmtflil and the populists of the 7os, with their

acuter sense of civic duty, whom Turgenev later attempted to describe, not

always successfully, in Yirgin Soil (see on this Joseph Frank, 'N. G. Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia', Tnt Soulntm RtJJitw, Baton Rouge, Winter 1 967, pp. 68-84-). This emerges most clearly in the famous controversy between

Tkachev and Lavrov in the 70s. Bazarov's historical importance is considerable, not because he is the original but because he is one of the antitheses of Rakhmetov; and this despite the story, which, according to at least one

source, Turgenev did not deny, that the same individual may have served

IS the 'model' for both. To this extent the indignant attacks by Antonovich

and later by Shelgunov, however intemperate or valueless IS criticism, were

not without foundation.

I Letter to Turgenev, 26 September 1 861. Quoted in V. A. Arkhipov, 'K

tvorcheskoi iatorii romana I. S. Turgeneva 0111y i tltti', Russlaya liltratura,

Moscow, 19S8 No I , p. 148.

I ibid., P· 147·

R U S SIAN THINKERS

Yet he cannot be both, 'he is a Janus with two faces, each party will

see only what it wants to see or can understand.'1

Katkov, in an unsigned review in his own journal (in which the

novel had appeared), went a good deal further. After mocking the

confusion on the left as a result of being unexpectedly faced with its

own image in nihilism, which pleased some and horrified others, he

reproaches the author for being altogether too anxious not to be unjust

to Bazarov, and consequently for representing him always in the best

possible light. There is such a thing, he says, as being too fair: this

leads to its own brand of distortion of the truth. As for the hero,

Bazarov is represented as being brutally candid: that is good, very good;

he believes in telling the whole truth, however upsetting to the poor,

gentle 'Kirsanovs, father and son, with no respect for persons or

circumstances: most admirable; he attacks art, riches, luxurious living;

yes, but in the name of what? Of science and knowledge? But, Katkov

declares, this is simply not true. Bazarov's purpose is not the discovery

of scientific truth, else he would not peddle cheap popular tracts­

Biichner and the rest-which are not science at all, but journalism,

materialist propaganda. Bazarov (he goes on to say) is not a scientist;

this species scarcely existli in Russia in our time. Bazarov and his

fellow nihilists are merely preachers: they denounce phrases, rhetoric,

inflated language- Bazarov tells Arkady not to talk so 'beautifully'but only in order to substitute for this their own political propaganda; they offer not hard scientific facts, in which they are not interested,

with which, indeed, they are not acquainted, but slogans, diatribes,

radical cant. Bazarov's dissection of frogs is not genuine pursuit of

the truth, it is only an occasion for rejecting civilised and traditional

values which Pavel Kirsanov, who in a better-ordered society-say

England-would have done useful work, rightly defends. Bazarov and

his friends will discover nothing; they are not researchers; they are