Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

FATHERS AND C H I LD REN

despise what men are and what they live by. The new insurgents of

our time favour-so far as they a.n bring themselves to be at all

coherent-something like a vague species of the old, natural law. They

want to build a society in which men treat one another as human

beings with unique claims to self-expression, however undisciplined

and wild, not as producing or consuming units in a centralised, worldwide, self-propelling social mechanism. Bazarov's progeny has won, and it is the descendants of the defeated, despised 'superfluous men',

of the Rudins and Kirsanovs and N ezhdanovs, of Chekhov's muddled,

pathetic students and cynical, broken doctors, who are today preparing

to man the revolutionary barricades. Yet the similarity with Turgenev's

predicament does hold: the modern rebels believe, as Bazarov and

Pisarev and Bakunin believed, that the first requirement is the clean

sweep, the total destruction of the present system; the rest is not their

business. The future must look after itself. Better anarchy than

prison; there is nothing in between. This violent cry meets with a

similar response in the breasts of our contemporary Shubins and

Kirsanovs and Potugins, the small, hesitant, self�ritical, not always

very brave, band of men who occupy a position somewhere to the

left of centre, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their

right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on

their left. Like the men of the 40s, for whom Turgenev spoke, they

are at once horrified and fascinated. They are shocked by the violent

irrationalism of the dervishes on the left, yet they are not prepared to

reject wholesale the position of those who claim to represent the young

and the disinherited, the indignant champions of the poor and the

socially deprived or repressed. This is the notoriously unsatisfactory,

at times agonising, position of the modern heirs of the liberal tradition.

'I understand the reasons for the anger which my book provoked

in a certain party,' wrote Turgenev just over a hundred years ago.

'A shadow has fallen upon my name . . . But is this really of the slightest

importance? Who, in twenty or thirty years' time, will remember all

these storms in a teacup, or indeed my name, with or without a

shadow�'1 Turgenev's name still lies under a shadow in his native

land. His artistic reputation is not in question; it is as a social thinker

that he is still today the subject of a continuing dispute. The situation

that he diagnosed in novel after novel, the painful predicament of the

believers in liberal western values, a predicament once thought

1 op. cit. (p. :z8z, note :z above), p. I S9·

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R U SS IAN THINKERS

peculiarly Russian, is today familiar everywhere. So, too, is his own

oscillating, uncertain position, his horror of reactionaries, his fear of

the barbarous radicals, mingled with a pasllionate anxiety to be understood and approved of by the ardent young. Still more familiar is his inability, despite his greater sympathy for the patty of protest, to cross

over unreservedly to either side ·in the conflict of ideas, classes, and,

above all, generations. The figure of the well-meaning, troubled, selfquestioning liberal, witness to the complex truth, which, as a literary type, Turgenev virtually created in his own image, has today become

universal. These are the men who, when the battle grows too hot,

tend either to stop their ears to the terrible din, or attempt to promote

armistices, save lives, aven chaos.

As for the storm in a teacup, of which Turgenev spoke, so far from

being forgotten, it blows over the entire world today. If the inner life,

the ideas, the moral predicament of men matter at all in explaining

the course of human history, then Turgeriev's novels, especially

Fathtrs and Childrm, quite apan from their literary qualities, are as

basic a document for the understanding of the Russian past and of our

present as the plays of Aristophanes for the understanding of classical

Athens, or Cicero's letters, or novels by Dickens or George Eliot, for

the understanding of Rome and Victorian England.

Turgenev may have loved Bazarov; he certainly trembled before

him. He understood, and to a degree sympathized with, the case

presented by the new J acobins, but he could not bear to think of what

their feet would trample. 'We have the same credulity', he wrote in the

mid-1 86os, 'and the same cruelty; the same hunger for blood, gold,

filth . . . the same meaningless suffering in the name of . . . the same

nonsense as that which Aristophanes mocked at two thousand years

ago • . .'1 And an? And beauty? 'Yes, these are powerful words . . .

The P mus of Milo is less open to question than Roman Law or the

principles of 1 789'1-yet she, too, and the works of Goethe and

Beethoven would perish. Cold-eyed Isis-as he calls nature-'has no

cause for haste. Soon or late, she will have the upper hand . . . she

knows nothing of an or liberty, as she does not know the good • . .'3

1 Quoted from DIJtJol',o, an address read by him in r 86+o which was later

caricatured by Dostoevsky in Tile Posstsml. See So!Jra,it rod1i,t11ii, vol. 9•

PP· I I B-19.

I ibid., P· 1 19.

I ibid., P· I ZO.

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FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

But why must men hurry so zealously to help her with her work of

turning all to dustl Education, only education, can retard this painful

process, for our civilisation is far from exhausted yet.

Civilisation, humane culture, meant more to the Russians, latecomers to Hegel's feast of the spirit, than to the blase natives of the west. Turgenev clung to it more passionately, was more conscious of

its precariousness, than even his friends Flaubert and Renan.But unlike

them, he discerned behind the philistine bourgeoisie a far more furious

opponent-the young iconoclasts bent on the total annihilation of his

world in the certainty that a new and more just world would emerge.

He understood the best among these Robespierres, as Tolstoy, or even

Dostoevsky, did not. He rejected their methods, he thought their goals

naive and grotesque, but his hand would not rise against them if this

meant giving aid and comfort to the generals and the bureaucrats. He

offered no clear way out: only gradualism and education, only reason.

Chekhov once said that a writer's business was not to provide solutions,

only to describe a situation so truthfully, do such justice to all sides

of the question, that the reader could no longer evade it. The doubts

Turgenev raised have not been stilled. The dilemma of morally

sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute

polarisation of opinion has, since his time, grown acute and worldwide. The predicament of what, for him, was only the 'educated section' of a country then scarcely regarded as fully European, has

come to be that of men in every class of society in our day. He recognised it in its earlier beginnings, and described it with incomparable sharpness of vision, poetry, and truth.

Appendix

As an illustration of the political atmosphere in Russia in the 1 87os

and 8os, especially with regard to the mounting wave of political

terrorism, the account that follows of a conversation with Dostoevsky

by his editor, A. S. Suvorin, may be of interest. Both Suvorin and

'Dostoevsky were loyal supporters of the autocracy and were looked

upon by liberals, not without reason, as strong and irredeemable

reactionaries. Suvorin's periodical, Ntw Timts (NovrJt vrtmyo), was

the best edited and most powerful extreme right-wing journal published

in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the

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R U S S IAN THINKERS

twentieth century. Suvorin's political position gives particular point

to this entry in his diary .1

On the day of the attempt by Mlodetsky1 on Loris Melikov I

was with F. M. Dostoevsky.

He lived in a shabby little apartment. I found him sitting by a

small round table in the drawing-room, he was rolling cigarettes;

his face was like that of someone who had just emerged from a

Russian bath, from a shelf on which he had been steaming himself

. . . I probably did not manage to conceal my surprise, because he

gave me a look and after greeting me, said 'I have just had an attack.

I am glad, very glad, to see you' and went on rolling his cigarettes.

Neither he nor I knew anything about the attempted assassination.

But our conversation presently turned to political crimes in general,

and a [recent] explosion in the Winter Palace in particular. In the

course of talking about this, Dostoevsky commented on the odd

attitude of the public to these crimes. Society seemed to sympathise

with them, or, it might be truer to say, was not too clear about how

to look upon them. 'Imagine', he said, 'that you and I are standing

by the window of Datsiaro's shop and looking at the pictures. A

man is standing near us, and pretending to look too. He seems to be

waiting for something, and keeps looking round. Suddenly another

man comes up to him hurriedly and says, "The Winter Palace will

be blown up very soon. I've set the machine." We hear this. You

must imagine that we hear it-that these people are so excited that

they pay no attention to their surroundings or how far their voices

amy. How would we act? Would we go to the Winter Palace to

warn them about the explosion, would we go to the police, or get

the corner constable to arrest these men? Would you do this?'

'No, I would not.'

'Nor would I. Why not? After all, it is dreadful; it is a crime.

We should have forestalled it.8 This is what I had been thinking

about before you came in, while I was rolling my cigarettes. I

went over all the reasons that might have made me do this. Weighty,

solid reasons. Then I considered the reasons that would have stopped

me from doing it. They are absolutely trivial. Simply fear of being

1 Dntr�niA A. S. Suflorina, ed. M. G. Krichevsky (Moscow/Petrograd,

1923). PP· I s-r 6. This entry for r 887 is the first in the diary of Dostoevsky's

(and Chekhov's) friend and publisher.

1 lppolit Mlodetsky made his attempt on the life of the head of the

Government on :zo February r 88o,some weeks after the failure ofKhalturin's

attempt to kill the Tsar. He was hanged two days la,ter.

• The Russian word can also mean 'give warning'.

JO.of.

FAT H E R S A N D C H I LD R E N

thought an informer. I imagined how I might come, the kind of

look I might get from them, how I might be interrogated, perhaps

confronted with someone, be offered a reward, or, maybe, suspected

of complicity. The newspapers might say that "Dostoevsky identified the criminals." Is this my affair? It is the job of the police. This is what they have to do, what they are paid for. The liberals would

never forgive me. They would torment me, drive me to despair. Is