Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

his fascination with the varieties of character and situation as such, his

detachment, his inveterate habit of doing justice to the full complexity

1 See German Lopatin's reminiscences in 1. 8. Turge� fl fiDspomilltJtri­

Jillh rtrJDiy•tsi!JIIffllfJ-StmitksytJJIIii!Jfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1930), p. u4.

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FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and diversity of goals, attitudes, beliefs-these seemed to them morally

self-indulgent and politically irresponsible. Like Montesquieu, he was

accused by the radicals of too much description, too little criticism.

Beyond all Russian writers, Turgenev possessed what Strakhov

described as his poetic and truthful genius-a capacity for rendering

the very multiplicity of interpenetrating human perspectives that

shade imperceptiblyintoeach other,nuancesofcharacterand behaviour,

motives and attitudes, undistorted by moral passion. The defence of

civilisation by the spoilt but intelligent Pavel Kirsanov is not a caricature, and carries a kind of conviction, while the defence of what are apparently the very same values by the worthless Panshin in the NtSt

ofGmtlifollt does not, and is not meant to do so; Lavretsky's Slavophil

feeling is moving and sympathetic; the populism of both the radicals

and the conservatives in Smoltt is-and is intended to be- repulsive.

This clear, finely discriminating, slightly ironical vision, wholly dissimilar from the obsessed genius of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, irritated all those who craved for primary colours, for certainty, who looked

to writers for moral guidance and found none in Turgenev's scrupulous,

honest, but-as it seemed to them-somewhat complacent ambivalence.

He seemed to enjoy his very doubts: he would not cut too deep. Both

his great rivals found this increasingly intolerable. Dostoevsky, who

began as an enthusiastic admirer, came to look on him as a smiling,

shallow, cosmopolitan pouur, a cold-hearted traitor to Russia. Tolstoy

thought him a gifted and truthful writer but a moral weakling, and

hopelessly blind to the deepest and most agonising spiritual problems

of mankind. To Herzen he was an amiable old friend, a gifted artist,

and a feeble ally, a reed that bent too easily before every storm, an

inveterate compromiser.

Turgenev could never bear his wounds in silence. He complained,

he apologised, he protested. He knew that he was accused of lack of

depth or seriousness or courage. The reception of Fathers and Children

continued to prey upon him. 'Seventeen years have passed since the

appearance of Fathers and Chi/drm,' he wrote in 1 88o, 'yet the attitude of the critics . . . has not become stabilised. Only last year, I happened to read in a journal apropos Bazarov, that I am nothing

but a bashi-bazouk1 who beats to death men wounded by others. '1

1 Barbarous Turkish mercenary.

• Preface to the 1 88o edition of his novels. Solmmit ID(IIifltflii, vo}. u,

PP· 3°7·8.

293

R U SSIAN T H INKERS

His sympathies, he insisted again and again, were with the victims,

never the oppressors-with peasants, students, artists, women, civilised

minorities, not the big battalions. How could his critics be so blindl As

for Bazarov, there was, of course, a great deal wrong with him, but

he was a better man than his detractors; it was easy enough to depict

radicals as men with rough exteriors and hearts of gold; 'the trick is

to make Bazarov a wild wolf, and still manage to justify him • . .'1

The one step Turgenev refused to take was to seek an alibi in the

doctrine of art for art's sake. He did not say, as he might easily have

done, 'I am an artist, not a pamphleteer; I write fiction, which must

not be judged by social or political criteria; my opinions are my private

affair; you don't drag Scott or Dickens or Stendhal or even Flaubert

before your ideological tribunals-why don't you leave me alone?' He

never seeks to deny the social responsibility of the writer; the doctrine

of social commitment was instilled into him once and for all by his

adored friend Belinsky, and from it he never wholly departed. This

social concern colours even his most lyrical writing, and it was this

that broke through the reserve of the revolutionaries he met abroad.

These men knew perfectly well that Turgenev was genuinely at his

ease only with old friends of his own class, men who held views that

could not conceivably be described as radical-with civilised liberals or

country squires with whom he went duck-shooting whenever he

could. Nevertheless, the revolutionaries liked him because he liked

them, because he sympathised with their indignation : 'I know I am

only a stick they use to beat the Government with, but' (at this point,

according to the exiled revolutionary Lopatin, who reports this conversation, he made an appropriate gesture) 'let them do it, I am only too glad.'1 Above all, they felt drawn to him because he was responsive

to them as individuals and did not treat them simply as representatives

of parties or oudooks. This was, in a sense, paradoxical, for it was

precisely individual social or moral characteristics that, in theory, these

men tried ·to ignore; they believed in objective analysis, in judging men

sociologically, in terms of the role that, whatever their conscious

motives, they played (whether as individuals or as members of a social

class) in promoting or obstructing desirable human ends-scientific

knowledge, or the emancipation of women, or economic progress, or

the revolution.

1 Letter to Herzen, 28 April J 862.

t G. Lopatin, op. cit. (p. 292, note 1 above), p. 1 26.

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FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

This was the very attitude that Turgenev recoiled from; it was

what he feared in Bazarov and the revolutionaries of Pirgin SDil.

Turgenev, and liberals generally, saw tendencies, political attitudes,

as functions of human beings, not human beings as functions of social

tendencies.1 Acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals,

not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely

the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being

primarily carriers or agents of impersonal forces was as deeply repellent

to Turgenev as it had been to Henen or, in his later phases, to his

revered friend Belinsky. To be treated with so much sympathy and

understanding, and indeed affection, as human beings and not primarily

as spokesmen for ideologies, was a nre enough experience, a kind of

luxury, for Russian revolutionary exiles abroad. This alone goes some

way to account for the fact that men like Stepnyak, Lopatin, Lavrov

and Kropotkin responded warmly to so understanding, and, moreover,

so delightful and so richly gifted a man as Turgenev. He gave them

secret subsidies but made no intellectual concessions. He believed-this

was his 'old-fashioned' liberalism in the 'English dynastic (he meant

constitutional] sense'1-that only education, only gradual methods,

'industry, patience, self-sacrifice, without glitter, without noise,

homoeopathic injections of science and culture' could improve the

lives of men. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to

which he had exposed himself, but, in his own apologetic way, refused

to 'simplify' himself. He went on believing-perhaps this was a relic

of his Hegelian youth- that no issue was dosed for ever, that every

thesis must be weighed against its antithesis, that systems and absolutes

of every kind-social and political no less than religious-were a form

of dangerous idolatry;3 above all, one must never go to war unless

and until all that one believes in is at stake and there is literally no

other way out. Some of the fanatical young men responded with

1 For this excellent formulation of the distinction between liberals and

radicals see Tilt Positiflt Htro i11 Ruui1111 Littrllturt, by R. W. Mathewson

(New York, 1 958).

I Letter to Yt1111ilt. Ef!ropy (see above, p. 29 1, note z). See also the )etten

to Stasyulevich (p. 290, note 1 above), and to Herzen of 2 5 November I 86z,

and F. V olkhovsky's article, 'I van Sergeevich Turgenev', Frtt Russi11, vol.

9 No 4 ( 1 898), pp. z�.

a See the letters to Countess Lambert in 1 864, and to the writer M. A.

Milyutina in 1 875, quoted with much other rdevant material in V. N.

Gorbacheva, Mo/oJyt goJy Turgt11tf!ll (Kazan, 1926).

..

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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

genuine regard and, at 'times, profound admiration. A young radical

wrote in 1 883 'Turgenev is dead. If Shchedrin1 should die too, then

one might as well go down to the grave alive . . . For us these men

replaced parliament, meetings, life, liberty !'1 A hunted member of a

terrorist organisation, in a tribute illegally published on the day of

Turgenev's funeral, wrote 'A gentleman by birth, an aristocrat by upbringing and character, a gradualist by conviction, Turgenev, perhaps without knowing it himself . . • sympathised with, and even served,

the Russian revolution. '3 The special police precautions at Turgenev's

funeral were clearly not wholly superfluous.

I I I

I t is time that Satums ceased dining off their children;

time, too, that children stopped devouring their parents

like the natives of Kamchatka.

Alexander Herzen'

Critical turning-points in history tend to occur, we are told, when a

form of life and its institutions are increasingly felt to cramp and

obstruct the most vigorous productive forces alive in a societyeconomic or social, artistic or intellectual-and it has not enough strength to resist them. Against such a social order, men and groups

of very different tempers and classes and conditions unite. There is an

upheaval-a revolution-which, at times, achieves a limited success. It

reaches a point at which some of the demands or interests of its

original promoters are satisfied to an extent which makes further

fighting on their part unprofitable. They stop, or struggle uncertainly.

The alliance disintegrates. The most passionate and single-minded,

especially among those whose purposes or ideals are furthest from

fulfilment, wish to press on. To stop half-way seems to them a betrayal.

The sated groups, or the less visionary, or those who fear that the old

yoke may be followed by an even more oppressive one, tend to hang

back. They find themselves assailed on two sides. The conservatives

look on them as, at best, knock-kneed supporters, at worst as deserters

1 The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin;

1 Littrahlmoe 11as/ttislrlo, vol. 76, p. 33 2, and I. 8. TurgtnnJ eo eoospomillatJi·

yalll sourtmtnniloeo, vol. I, Introduction, p. 36.

• The author of the pamphlet was P. F. Yakubovich (quoted in Turgtneeo

eo nmloi hitilt, p. 401).

' 8o6ranit sod1intnii, vol. 10, p. 3 19.