Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

mere ranters, men who declaim in the name of a science which they

do not trouble to master; in the end they are no better than the

ignorant, benighted Russian priesthood from whose ranks they mostly

spring, and far more dangerous.•

Herzen, as always, was both penetrating and amusing. 'Turgenev

1 ibid.

1 'Roman Turgeneva i ego kritiki', R•sslii fltllflil, May 1 86z, pp. 393"

.f.Z6, and '0 nashem nigilizme. Po povodu romana Turgeneva', ibid., July

1 86z, pp. 4oz-z6.

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

was more of an artist in his novel than people think, and for this

reason lost his way, and, in my opinion, did very well. He wanted

to go to one room, but ended up in another and a better one.'1 The

author clearly started by wanting to do something for the fathers, but

they turned out to be such nonentities that he 'became carried away

by Bazarov's very extremism; with the result that instead of Bogging

the son, he whipped the fathers'.21 Herzen may well be right: it may

be that, although Turgenev does not admit this, Bazarov, whom the

author began as a hostile portrait, came to fascinate his creator to such

a degree that, like Shylock, he turns into a figure more human and a

great deal more complex than the design of the work had originally

allowed for, and so at once transforms and perhaps distorts it. Nature

sometimes imitates art: Bazarov affected the young as Werther, in the

previous century, influenced them, like Schiller's The Rohhers, like

Byron's Laras and Giaours and Childe Harolds in their day. Yet these

new men, Herzen added in a later essay, are so dogmatic, doctrinaire,

jargon-ridden, as to exhibit the least attractive aspect of the Russian

character, the policeman's-the martinet's-side of it, the brutal

bureaucratic jackboot; they want to break the yoke of the old despotism,

but only in order to replace it with one of their own. The 'generation

of the 4os', his own and Turgenev's, may have been fatuous and weak,

but does it follow that their successors-the brutally rude, loveless,

cynical, philistine young men of the 6os, who sneer and mock and

push and jostle and don't apologise-are necessarily superior beings?

What new principles, what new constructive answers have they

provided? Destruction is destruction. It is not creation. 8

In the violent babel of voices aroused by the novel, at least five

attitudes can be distinguished.& There was the angry right wing which

thought that Bazarov represented the apotheosis of the new nihilists,

and sprang from Turgenev's unworthy desire to Ratter and be accepted

by the young. There were those who congratulated him on successfully exposing barbarism and subversion. There were those who denounced him for his wicked travesty of the radicals, for providing

reactionaries with ammunition and playing into the hands of the

1 A. I. Herzen, 'Eshche raz Bazarov', So6ra11it SIJchilltllii, vol. zo, p. 339·

I ibid.

a 81J6r1111it so&hi11t11ii, vol. 1 1, p. 3 5 1.

& For a full analysis of the immediate reaction to the novel see 'Z' (E. F.

Zarin), 'Ne v brov', a v glaz', Bi6/iottlta dlya chlt11iya, 1 86z No 4.. pp. z 1-5 5·

..

R U SS IAN T H INKERS

police; by them he was c;alled renegade and traitor. Still others, like

Dmitry Pisarev, proudly nailed Bazarov's colours to their mast and

expressed gratitude to Turgenev for his honesty and sympathy with

all that was most living and fearless in the growing party of the future.

Finally there were some who detected that the author himself was

not wholly sure of what he wanted to do, that his attitude was genuinely

ambivalent, that he was an artist and not a pamphleteer, that he told

the truth as he saw it, without a clear partisan purpose.

This controversy continued in full strength after Turgenev's death.

It says something for the vitality of his creation that the debate did

not die even in the following century, neither before nor after the

Russian Revolution. Indeed, as lately as ten years ago the battle was

still raging amongst Soviet critics. Was Turgenev for us or against us?

Was he a Hamlet blinded by the pessimism of his declining class, or

did he, like Balzac or Tolstoy, see beyond it? Is Bazarov a forerunner

of the politically committed, militant Soviet intellectual, or a malicious

caricature of the fathers of Russian communism? The debate is not

over yet.1

1 The literature, mostly polemical, is very extensive. Among the most

representative essays may be listed: V. V. Vorovsky's celebrated 'Dva nigilizma:

Bazarov i Sanin' (1909), Sochin�niya (Moscow, 193 I), vol. z, pp. 74-Ioo;

V. P. Kin in Lit�ratura i mark1izm, vol. 6 (Moscow, I 9z9), pp. 7 I-I I6;

L. V. Pumpyansky, '0111y i J�ti. lstoriko-literatumyi ocherk', in I� S.

Turgenev, Sochin�niya (Moscow/Leningrad, I939), vol. 6, pp. 167-86; I. K.

lppolit, unin D Turg�ntfl� (Moscow, I93.f.); I. I. Veksler, /. s. Turg�ntfl ;

politichukay• 6or'6a JAtJtituJyatyk!t goJIJfJ (Moscow/Leningrad, 1 93 5); V. A.

Arkhipov, in Ruukaya lituatura, 1958 No I, pp. I 3z-6:z; G. A. Byaly, in

NIJfJyi mir, Moscow, I958 No 8, pp. :z5 5-9; A. I. Batyuto, in /. 8. Turg�nto

(I8I8-I883-I958): Jtat'i i mat�rialy (Orel, I96o), pp. 77-95; P. G.

Pustovoit, Roman /. 8. Turg�ntoa Otllly i deti i iJtinaya 6or' 6a 6okh godot:J

XIX r;da (Moscow, 1 96o); N. Chernov in Yopro1y lit�ratury, Moscow,

1961 No 8, pp. I 88-93; William Egerton in Ruukaya lit�ratura, I967 No I,

PP· I49-54·

This represents a mere sample of the continuing controversy, in which

Lenin's scathing reference to the similarity of Turgenev's views to those

of German right-wing social democrats is constantly quoted both for and

against the conception of Bazarov as a prototype of Bolshevik activists. There

is an even more extensive mass of writing on the question of whether, and

how far, Katkov managed to persuade Turgenev to amend his tert in a

'moderate' direction by darkening Bazarov's image. That Turgenev did

alter his text as a result of Katkov's pleading is certain; he may, however,

286

FATH ERS AND C H I LDREN

T urgenev was upset and bewildered by the reception of his book.

Before sending it to the printer, he had taken his usual precaution of

seeking endless advice. He read the manuscript to friends in Paris, he

altered, he modi lied, he tried to please everyone. The figure of Bazarov

suffered several transformations in successive drafts, up and down the

moral scale as this or that friend or consultant reported his impressions.

The attack from the left inflicted wounds which festered for the rest

of his life. Years later he wrote 'I am told that I am on the side of

the "fathers"- I, who in the person of Pavel Kirsanov, actually sinned

against artistic truth, went too far, exaggerated his defects to the point

of travesty, and made him ridiculous !'1 As for Bazarov, he was

'honest, truthful, a democrat to his fingertips'.1 Many years later,

Turgenev told the anarchist Kropotkin that he loved Bazarov 'very,

very much . . . I will show you my diaries-you will see how I wept

when I ended the book with Bazarov's death.'8 'Tell me honestly,'

he wrote to one of his most caustic critics, the satirist Saltykov (who

complained that the word 'nihilist' was used by reactionaries to damn

anyone they did not like), 'how could anybody be offended by being

compared to Bazarov? Do you not yourself realise that he is the most

sympathetic of all my characters�'' As for 'nihilism', that, perhaps,

was a mistake. 'I am ready to admit . . . that I had no right to give

our reactionary scum the opportunity to seize on a name, a catchword;

the writer in me should have brought the sacrifice to the citizen- I

admit the justice of my rejection by the young and of all the gibes

hurled at me . . . The issue was more important than artistic truth,

have restored some, at any rate, of the original language when the novel was

published as a book. His relations with Katkov deteriorated rapidly; Turgenev

came to look on him as a vicious reactionary and refused his proffered hand

at a banquet in honour of Pushkin in I 88o; one of his favourite habits was

to refer to the arthritis which tormented him as Katkovitis (AatlOfl.fa). On

this see N. M. Gutyar, lrJtlfl Strguviclz TurgtflttJ (Yurev, 1907), and V. G.

Bazanov, /z littraturtloi poltmiAi 6oAh godOfl (Petrozavodsk, 1 94I), pp. 46-8.

The list of 'corrections' in the text for which Katkov is held responsible is

ritually reproduced in virtually every Soviet study of Turgenev's works. But

see also A. Batyuto, 'Parizhskaya rukopis' romana I. S. Turgeneva Ottsy i

tkti', RussAaya littratura, 1 961 No 4o pp. 57-78.

1 Littralurtlyt i z.hiltisAit tJospomiflafliya, p. I S S.

t Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, :z6 April I 86:z.

a /. S. TurgtflttJ fJ tJospomiflafliyaAII SOtJrtflltflfliAOtJ, vol. I, p. 441 .

• Letter to M . E . Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

•'

2.87

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

and I ought to have foreseen this. '1 He claimed that he shared almost

all Bazarov's views, all save those on art. 1 A lady of his acquaintance

had told him that he was neither for the fathers, nor for the children,

but was a nihilist himself; he thought she might be right. 8 Herun

had said that there had been something of Bazarov in them all, in

himself, in Belinsky, in Bakunin, in all those who in the I 84os

denounced the Russian kingdom of darkness in the name of the west

and science and civilisation.' Turgenev did not deny this either. He

did, no doubt, adopt a different tone in writing to different correspondents. When radical Russian students in Heidelberg demanded clarification of his own position, he told them that 'if the reader does not love Bazarov, as he is-coarse, heartless, ruthlessly dry and brusque • . . the

fault is mine; I have not succeeded in my task. But to "dip him in

syrup" (to use his own expression)-that I was not prepared to do . . . I

did not wish to buy popularity by this sort of concession. Better lose a

battle (and I think I have lost this one), than win it by a trick.'11 Yet

to his friend the poet Fet, a conservative landowner, he wrote that he

did not himself know if he loved Bazarov or hated him. Did he mean

to praise or denigrate him? He did not know.8 And this is echoed

eight years later: 'My pei'S(Jnal feelings [towards Bazarov] were

confused (God only knows whether I loved him or hated him) !'7 To

the liberal Madame Filosofova he wrote, 'Bazarov is my beloved child;

on his account I quarrelled with Katkov . . . Bazarov, that intelligent,

heroic man-a caricature? !' And he added that this was 'a senseless

charge'.8

He found the scorn of the young unjust beyond endurance. He

wrote that in the summer of I 862 'despicable generals praised me, the

young insulted me'. 8 The socialist leader Lavrov reports that he bitterly

complained to him of the injustice of the radicals' change of attitude

towards him. He returns to this in one of his late Ponns in Prost:

'Honest souls turned away from him. Honest faces grew red with