Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

1 ibid.

1 Liltrotumyt i zhittis �it rJospDmittoniyo, p. 1 55.

8 ibid., P· I 57.

' 'Eshche raz Bazarov', 8o6ronit sochintnii, vo]. zo, pp. 3 3 5-50.

6 Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, z6 April I 86z.

8 Letter of 1 8 April I 86z.

7 Letter to I. P. Borisov, 4 January I 87o.

8 Letter of 30 August I 874.

11 Letter to Marko Vovchok (Mme Markovich}, z7 August I 8liz.

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FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

indignation at the mere mention of his name. '1 This was not mere

wounded amour propre: He suffered from a genuine sense of having

got himself into a politically false position. All his life he wished to

march with the progressives, with the party ofliberty and protest. But,

in the end, he could not bring himself to accept their brutal contempt

for art, civilised behaviour, for everything that he held dear in Eur�

pean culture. He hated their dogmatism, their arrogance, their

destructiveness, their appalling ignorance of life. He went abroad,

lived in Germany and France, and returned to Russia only on flying

visits. In the west he was universally praised and admired. But in the

end it was to Russians that he wished to speak. Although his popularity

with the Russian public in the I 86os, and at all times, was very great,

it was the radicals he most of all wanted to please. They were hostile

or unresponsive.

His next novel, Smoke, which he began immediately after the

publication of Fathers and Children, was a characteristic attempt to

staunch his wounds, to settle his account with all his opponents. It

was published five years later, in I 867, and contained a biting satire

directed at both camps: at the pompous, stupid, reactionary generals

and bureaucrats, and at the foolish, shallow, irresponsible left-wing

talkers, equally remote from reality, equally incapable of remedying

the ills of Russia. This provoked further onslaughts on him. This time

he was not surprised. 'They are all attacking me, Reds and Whites,

from above and below, and from the sides, especially from the sides.'1

The Polish rebellion of I 863 and, three years later, Karakozov's

attempt to assassinate the Emperor produced great waves of patriotic

feeling even within the ranks of the liberal Russian intelligentsia.

Turgenev was written off by the Russian critics, of both the right

and the left, as a disappointed man, an expatriate who no longer knew

his country from the distance of Baden-Baden and Paris. Dostoevsky

denounced him as a renegade Russian and advised him to procure a

telescope which might enable him to see Russia a little better.8

In the 70s he began nervously, in constant fear of being insulted

1 From the prose poem 'Uslyshish' sud gluptsa'. Quoted by P. Lavrov in

'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie russkogo obshchestva', Ye111rilt frtlrrJJ,oi rJo/i, vol. :z

(Geneva, I 884), p. I I9.

I Letter to Herzen, 4 June I 867.

3 See Dostoevsky's letter to the poet A. N. Maikov of :z8 August I 867

(quoted in N. M. Gutyar, op. cit. [P· :z86, note I above], pp. 337-40}.

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2.89

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

and humiliated, to rebuild his relations with the left wing. To his

astonishment and relief, he was well received in Russian revolutionary

circles in Paris and London; his intelligence, his goodwill, his undiminished hatred for tsardom, his transparent honesty and fairmindedness, his warm sympathy with individual revolutionaries, his great charm, had its effect on their leaders. Moreover, he showed

courage, the courage of a naturally timorous man determined to overcome his terrors: he supported subversive publications with secret gifts of money, he took risks in openly meeting proscribed terrorists

shadowed by the police in Paris or London; this melted their resistance.

In 1 876 he published f'irgin Soil (which he intended as a continuation

of Fathtrs and Children) in a final attempt to explain himself to the

indignant young. 'The younger generation', he wrote in the following

year, 'have, so far, been represented in our literature either as a gang

of cheats and crooks . . . or . . . elevated into an ideal, which again is

wrong, and, what is more, harmful. I decided to find the middle way,

to come closer to the truth -to take young people, for the most pan

good and honest, and show that, in spite of their honesty, their cause

is so devoid of truth and life that it can only end in a total fiasco.

How far I have succeeded is not for me to say . . . But they must feel

my sympathy . . . if not for their goals, at least for their personalities. •1

The hero of f'irgin Soil, Nezhdanov, a failed revolutionary, ends by

committing suicide. He does so largely because his origins and character

make him incapable of adapting himself to the harsh discipline of a

revolutionary organisation, or to the slow and solid work of the true

hero of the novel, the practical reformer Solomin, whose quietly

ruthless labours within his own democratically organised factory will

create a more just social order. N ezhdanov is too civilised, too sensitive,

too weak, above all too complex, to fit into an austere, monastic, new

order: he thrashes about painfully, but, in the end, fails because he

'cannot simplify himself'; nor-and this (as Irving Howe has pointed

out)2 is the central point-could Turgenev. To his friend Yakov

Polonsky he wrote: 'If I was beaten with sticks for Fathers and

Children, for f'irgin Soil they will beat me with staves, from both sides,

as usual. '3 Three years later Katk.ov's newspaper again denounced him

1 Letter to M. M. Stasyulevich, 3 January 1 877.

1 See the excellent essay on Turgenev in Politiu a,id the NOflel (London,

1961).

• Letter o£ 23 November 1 876.

FATHERS AND C H I LD R E N

for 'performing clownish somersaults to please the young' .1 As always.

he replied at once: he had not. he said. altered his views by an iota

during the last fony years. 'I am. and have always been. a "gradualist".

an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense. a man expecting

reform rmly from above. I oppose revolution in principle . . • I should

regard it as unworthy of [our youth] and myself. to represent myself in

any other light. '1

By the late 70s his shoncomings had been forgiven by the left. His

moments of weakness, his constant attempts to justify himself before

the Russian authorities, his disavowals of relations with the exiles in

London or Paris-all these sins seem to have been all but forgotten. a

His charm, his sympathy for the persons and convictions of individual

revolutionaries, his truthfulness as a writer, won much goodwill

among the exiles. even though they harboured no illusions about the

extreme moderation of his views and his inveterate habit of taking

cover when the battle became too hot. He went on telling the radicals

that they were mistaken. When the old has lost authority and the new

works badly, what is needed is something that he spoke of in the

Nest of Gentlefolk: 'active patience, not without some cunning and

1 See B. Markevich (under the pseudonym 'lnogorodnyi obyvatel'), 'S

beregov Nevy', Moslwslie t1etlomosti, 9 December 1 879.

I Letter to Yestnik ErJropy (Tiu European Heraltl), 2 January 1 88o,

Solmznit sodzint11ii, vol. I S• p. 1 8 5.

a In I 863 he was summoned back from Paris to be interrogated by a

Senatorial Commission in St Petersburg abOut his relations with Herzen

and Bakunin. How could he have plotted with theae men, he protested, he

who was a life-long monarchist, a butt of bitter onslaughts by the 'Reds'?

After F atlzers and C/zildrtn, he assured the Senaton, his relations with

Herzen, which had never been very close, had been 'severed'. There was an

element of truth in this. But it was not perhaps surprising that Herzen (who

had not forgotten Turgenev's refusal to sign his and Ogarev's manifesto

criticising the shortcomings of the Act of Emancipation of the ser&) should,

characteristically, have referred to 'a white-haired Magdalen of the male sex'

who could not sleep at night for thinking that the Emperor might not have

heasd of her repentance. Turgenev and Herzen saw each other again in

later years, but never again on the same intimate terms. In 1 879 Turgenev

similarly hastened to deny all connection with Lavrov and his fellow revolutionaries. Lavrov, too, forgave him. (For Turgenev's relations with Lavrov and other revolutionary 4!migrt!s see P. L. Lavrov, 'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie

russkogo obshchestva', op. cit. [p. 2 89, note I above], pp. � 149, and Michel

Delines [M. 0. Ashkinazy], TOflrgol•tjfi11t01111fl [Paris, 1888], pp. S3-7 S·)

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R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

ingenuity'. When the crisis i s upon us, 'when', i n his telling phrase,

'the incompetent come up against the unscrupulous', what is wanted is

practical good sense, not the absurd, nostalgic idyll of Herzen and the

populists, with their blind, idolatrous adoration of the peasant who is

the worst reactionary of the lot. He said over and over again that he

loathed revolution, violence, barbarism. He believed in slow progress,

made only by minorities 'if only they do not destroy each other'. As

for socialism, it was a fantasy. It is characteristic of Russians, says his

hero and mouthpiece, Potugin, in Smolte, 'to pick up an old, wornout shoe which long, long ago fell from the foot of a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, and, placing it reverently on one's head, to treat it as

a sacred object'. As for equality, to the revolutionary Lopatin he

said, 'We are not, all of us, really going to walk about in identical

yellow tunics a Ia Saint-Simon, all buttoned at the back?'1 Still, they

were the young, the party of freedom and generosity, the party of the

have-nots, of those in pain or at least in distress; he would not refuse

them his sympathy, his help, his love, even while all the time looking

over his shoulder guiltily at his right-wing friends to whom he tried

again and again to minimise his unceasing flirtation with the left. On

his visits to Moscow or St Petersburg he tried to arrange meetings

with groups of radical students. Sometimes the conve�tions went well,

at other times, particularly when he tried to charm them with his

reminiscences of the 40s, they tended to become bored, contemptuous,

and resentful. Even when they liked or admired him, he felt that a

gulf divided them, divided those who wanted to destroy the old world,

root and branch, from those who, like him, wished to save it, because

in a new world, created by fanaticism and violence, there might be

too little worth living for.

It was his irony, his tolerant scepticism, his lack of passion, his

'velvet touch', above all his determination to avoid too definite a social

or political commitment that, in the end, alienated both sides. Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, despite their open opposition to 'the progressives',

embodied unshakeable principles and remained proud and selfconfident, and so never became targets for those who threw stones at Turgenev. His very gifts, his power of minute and careful observation,