Berlin Isaiah

Russian Thinkers

PENGUIN BOOKS

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Sir Isaiah Berlin OM is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In the course

of his academic career he has been President of the British Academy, Professor

of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and the first

President of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is an Honorary Fellow of four

Oxford Colleges, and has received Honorary Doctorates from a number of

universities around the world. His work covers a wide variety of subjects and

apart from his work in the fields of philosophy and political studies he

has made some notable contributions to Russian studies; some of his most

acclaimed essays are to be found in this volume. His superb translations of

Turgenev's First Love and A Month in the Country are both published in

Penguin Classics. Among his many other publications are Karl Marx (1939),

The Age of Enlightenment (1956), Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Vico and Herder

(1976), Against the Current (1979), Personal Impressions (1980), The Crooked

Timber of Humanity (1990), The Magus of the Nonh (1993), on). G. Hamann,

and The Sense of Reality (1996). His latest book is The Proper Study of Mankind

(1997), an anthology of essays drawn from previous volumes. Russian Thinkers

was first published as a collection in 1978.

In 1977 Sir Isaiah received the Jerusalem Prize for his defence of human

liberty. He has also been awarded the Erasmus Prize (1983) for his contribution to European culture, and the Agnelli Prize (1987) for his writings on the ethical aspects of modem industrial societies.

Henry Hardy, in addition to co-editing this volume, has edited seven other

books by Isaiah Berlin: Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal

Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Magus of the Nonh, The Sense

of Reality and The Proper Study of Mankind (co-edited with Roger Hausheer).

From 1985 to 1990 he was Senior Editor, Political and Social Studies, at

Oxford University Press. He is now a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford,

where he is working on a collection of Isaiah Berlin's letters.

Aileen Kelly, introducer and co-editor of this volume, received her D.Phil. in

Russian Studies from Oxford and is now a Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at

Cambridge University and a Fellow of King's College. She is the author of

Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Prychology and Politics of Utopianism, and is

currendy working on a study of Alexander Herzen.

ISAIAH BERLIN

'R!!Jsian Thinkers

Edited by

Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly

With an Introduction by

Aileen Kelly

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press Ltd I 978

First published in the United States of America by

The Viking Press I97B

Published in Pelican Books I979

Reprinted in Penguin Books I 994

3 5 7 9 IO 8 6 4

Copyright 1948, 1951, 1953 by Isaiah Berlin

Copyright© Isaiah Berlin, 1955. 1956, 1960, 1961, 1972, 1978

'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty' copyright©

President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1955

This selection and editorial matter copyright ©

Henry Hardy, 1978

Introduction copyright© Aileen Kelly, 1978

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Berlin, Isaiah, Sir.

Russian thinkers.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Russia-lntellectual life---18o1-1917-

Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Intellectuals-

Russia-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Hardy,

Henry. II. Kelly, Aileen. Ill. Title.

(DK189.2.B47 1979)

947' .07

78-2082.3

ISBN o 14 oz.zz6o x

Printed in England by Clays Ltd,

St lves pic

Set in Caslon

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the

publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than

that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Autlwr' s Prifau

pagt vii

Editorial Prtfau

IX

Introduction: A Complex Vision by Ailttn Ktl/y

xiii

Russia and I 848

The Hedgehog and the Fox

22

Herun and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

82

A Remarkable Decade

I The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia

1 1 4

II German Romanticism in Petersburg

and Moscow

IJ6

I II Vissarion Belinsky

I 50

IV Alexander Herun

1 86

Russian Populism

2 1 0

Tolstoy and Enlightenment

2J8

Fathers and Children

261

lndt11

J06

v

Author's Preface

The essays collected in this volume, the first of four, were written, or

delivered as lectures, on various occasions over almost thirty years, and

therefore possess less unity of theme than if they had been conceived

in relation to one another. I am naturally most grateful to the editor

of these collected papers, Dr Henry Hardy, for his conviction that

they are worth exhuming, and for the meticulous and unremitting

care with which he has seen to it that some of their blemishes, in

particular inaccuracies, inconsistencies and obscurities, have been, so far

as possible, eliminated. Naturally, I continue to be solely responsible

for the shortcomings that remain.

I owe a great debt also to Dr Aileen Kelly for furnishing this

volume with an introduction: in particular, for her deep and sympathetic understanding of the issues discussed and of my treatment of them. I am also most grateful to her for the great trouble to which,

in the midst of her own work, she has gone in checking and, on

occasion, emending, vague references and excessively free translations.

Her steady advocacy has almost persuaded me that the preparation of

this volume may have been worthy of so much intelligent and devoted

labour. I can only hope that the result will prove to have justified the

expenditure of her own and Dr Hardy's time and energy.

A number of these essays began life as lectures for general audiences,

not read from a prepared text. The published versions were based on

transcripts of the spoken words, as well as the notes for them, and, as I

am well aware, they bear the marks of their origin in both their style

and their structure.

The original texts remain substantially unaltered: no attempt has

been made to revise them in the light of anything published subsequently on the history of Russian ideas in the nineteenth c:entury, since nothing, so far as I know, has appeared in this (somewhat

sparsely cultivated) field to cast serious doubt on the central theses of

these essays. I may, however, be mistaken about this; if so, I should

like to assure the reader that this is due to ignorance on my pan rather

than unshakeable confidence in the validity of my own opinions.

VII

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Indeed, the entire burden of these collected essays, so far as they can

be said to display any single tendency, is distrust of all claims to the

possession of incorrigible knowledge about issues of fact or principle

in any sphere of human behaviour.

ISAIAH BERLIN

July I977

viii

Editorial Preface

This is one of five volumes in which I have brought together, and

prepared for reissue, most of the published essays by Isaiah Berlin

which had not hitherto been made available in a collected form.1 His

many writings were scattered, often in obscure places, most were out

of print, and only half a dozen essays had previously been collected

and reissued.2 These five volumes, together with the list of his

publications which one of them (Against the Current) contains, 3 and a

new volume on j. G. Hamann, 4 have made much more of his work

readily accessible than before.

The present volume comprises ten essays on nineteenth-century

Russian literature and thought. The details of their original publication are as follows. 'Russia and I 848' appeared in the Slavonic Review 26 (I948); The Hedgehog and the Fox' first appeared, in a shorter

form, as 'Lev Tolstoy's Historical Scepticism' in Oxford Slavonic

Papers 2 (I95I), and was reprinted with additions under its present

title in I953 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London, and by Simon

and Schuster in New York; 'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual

Liberty' was published in Ernest j. Simmons (ed.), Continuity and

Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts,

I 9 55: Harvard University Press); the four esays collectively entitled

I This volume was first published in London and New York in 1978. The

other volumes are Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 197 8;

New York, 1979), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London,

1979; New York, 1980), Persona/Impressions (London, 1980; New York,

198 1) and The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

(London, 1990; New York, 1991).

z Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969; New York, 1970) and Vico atld

Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New York, 1976).

Other collections have appeared only in translation.

3 Its currently most up-to-date version appears in the 1991 impression of

the Oxford University Press paperback edition.

4 The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, edited by Henry Hardy (London, 1993; New York, 1994).

R USS IA N T H I NKERS

'A Remarkable Decade', reprinted here from the version published

as 'A Marvellous Decade' in Encounter 4 No 6 (June I955), 5 No I 1

(November 1955), 5 No 12 (December 1955) and 6 No 5 (May 1956),

originated as the Northcliffe Lectures for 19 54 (delivered at U niversity College, London), which were also broadcast later that year on the Third Programme of the BBC; 'Russian Populism' is the

introduction to Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (London, 1960:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1960: Knopf), and also

appeared in Encounter 15 No 1 (July 1960); 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', the P.E.N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lecture for I960, was published first in Encounter I 6 No 2 (February 1961 ), and subsequently in Mightier Than The Sword (London, 1964: Macmillan);

'Fathers and Children', the Romanes Lecture for I 970, was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1972 (reprinted with corrections, 1973), and has also appeared in the New York Review of

Books ( 1 B October, 1 and 15 November, 1973) and as the introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, 197 5: Penguin). I am grateful to the

publishers concerned for allowing me to reprint these essays.

'A Remarkable Decade', 'Russian Populism' and 'Tolstoy and

Enlightenment' have been left without references, as they originally

appeared. A few passages- chiefly translations- were rewritten by

the author for this volume. Otherwise, apart from necessary corrections, and the addition of missing references, the essays are reprinted essentially in their original form.

Those who know the author's work in this field will notice that two

important items are missing. The first is the introduction to an

English translation of Alexander Herzen's From the Other Shore and

The Russian People and Socialism (London, 1956; revised edition,

Oxford, 1979); the second is the introduction to Constance Garnett's

translation of Herzen's memoirs, My Past and Thoughts (London and

New York, 1968). Both of these pieces overlap to some extent with

the two essays on Herzen in this volume. The first does not appear in

any of the five volumes; the second is included in Against the Current,

where it is equally at home.1

1 Readers may like to have a list of other pieces in this area which do not

appear here. There are three radio talks: 'The Man Who Became a Myth'

(Belinsky), Listener 38 (1947); 'The Father of Russian Marxism'

X

EDI T ORIAL PREFACE

I have many debts of gratitude, and can mention only the weightiest here. First and foremost, the great bulk of the detailed editorial work on this volume was undertaken by Dr Aileen Kelly, without

whose specialist knowledge of the Russian language and of

nineteenth-century Russian culture my task would have been impossible. During an unusually busy time she devoted many hours to the search for answers to my queries, and my obligation and gratitude to her are very great. Isaiah Berlin himself was unfailingly courteous, good-humoured and informative in response both to my

persistent general advocacy of the whole project, which he regarded

throughout with considerable, and mounting, scepticism, and to my

often over-meticulous probings into points of detail. Lesley

Chamberlain gave valuable help with 'Herzen and Bakunin on

Individual Liberty'. Pat Utechin, Isaiah Berlin's secretary, was an

indispensable source of help and encouragement at all stages.

HENRY HARDY

February 1994

P OSTSCRIPT 1997

Since the above Preface was written I have edited two further volumes

of essays by Isaiah Berlin: The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas

and their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997), which mainly

comprises previously unpublished work; and The Proper Study of

Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, co-edited with Roger Hausheer

(London, 1997), a selection drawn from previous volumes which aims

to represent the best of Berlin's work, across its whole range.

H.H.

(Piekhanov), Listmer 56 ( 1956); and ' The Role of the Intelligentsia', Listmer

79 ( 1968). There are three contributions to Foreign Affairs on modern Russia,

which, though they do not strictly belong in this company, have many points

of contact with the essays included here: these pieces are 'Generalissimo

Stalin and the Art of Government', Foreign Affairs 30 ( 1952), and two articles

in Foreign Affairs 36 ( 1957), ' The Silence in Russian Culture' and ' The Soviet

Intelligentsia'. 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', mainly

about Akhmatova and Pasternak, is to be found in Pmonallmpt7!ssions. For

book reviews and other smaller pieces, I refer readers to the bibliography

already cited.

Introduction

A COMPLEX VISION

Aileen Kelly

Do not look for solutions in this book-there

arc none; in general modern man has no solutions.

Alexander Herzen, Introduction to From the Other Shore

In an attempt to explain the Russian revolution to Lady Ottoline

Morrell, Bertrand Russell once remarked that, appalling though

Bolshevik despotism was, it seemed the right sort of government for

Russia: 'If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be

governed, you will understand.'

The view that despotic socialism was no more than Russia deserved

would be accepted by many western liberals as not unjust, at least with

regard to the 'devils' of Dostoevsky's novel, the Russian radical

intelligentsia. In the degree of their alienation from their society and

of their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth

century were a phenomenon almost sui generis. Their ideological

leaders were a small group with the cohesivenes-; and sense of mission

of a religious sect. In their fervent moral opposition to the existing

order, their single-minded preoccupation with ideas, and their faith in

reason and science, they paved the way for the Russian revolution, and

thereby achieved major historical significance. But they are all too

often treated by English and American historians with a mixture of

condescension and moral revulsion; because the theories to which they

were so passionately attached were not their own, but borrowed from

the west and usually imperfectly understood; and because in their

fanatical passion for extreme ideologies they are held to have rushed,

like Dostoevsky's devils, to blind self-destruction, dragging their

country, and subsequently much of the rest of the world, after them.

The Russian revolution and its aftermath have done much to strengthen

xiii

R U S SIAN THIN K E R S

the belief, deeply entrenched in the Anglo-Saxon outlook, that a

passionate interest in ideas is a symptom of mental and moral disorder.

One liberal voice has strongly and consistently dissented from this

view of the Russian intelligentsia-a voice of remarkable distinction.

Isaiah Berlin is one of the most outstanding liberal thinkers of this

century: his Four Essays 011 Libtrty are contributions of the first importance to the study of the fundamental problems of political philosophy.

His originality as a thinker derives from a combination of a liberalism

in the English tradition with a wholly European fascination with ideas

and their effects on political practice: his writings are penetrated with

the conviction that liberal values are best understood and defended by

those who seek to understand the part played by ideas in action, and in

particular the intellectual and moral attractions of what he calls the

'great despotic visions' of the right and left. His distinctive contribution

to English intellectual life has been an effective opposition to the last

half-century of relative indifference to intellectual movements in

Europe. In essays and lectures, masterpieces of vivid and lucid exposition, he has acquainted a wide audience with great European intellectual traditions, with the ideas and personalities of some of the most original thinkers of the post-Renaissance world, and, in the -essays

collected together for the first time in this book, with the phenomenon

of the Russian intelligentsia.

Isaiah Berlin's approach to the intelligentsia has been directed by his

interest in the way in which ideas are 'lived through' as solutions to

moral demands. In contrast to the majority of studies on this subject,

which set out to j udge political solutions in the light of historical hindsight, he is above all concerned with the social and moral questions which the intelligentsia posed, the dilemmas that they sought to resolve.

Though his essays on Russian subjects stand by themselves, with no

need of philosophical annotation or cross-reference, they are also a

substantial contribution to the central theme of all his writings on

intellectual history, and their originality can best be appreciated if they

are approached within this wider framework.

The central concern of Berlin's writings has been the exploration of

what he sees as one of the m_ost fundamental of the open issues on

which men's moral conduct depends: are all absolute values ultimately

compatible with one another, or is there no single final solution to the

problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal?

In wide-ranging studies he has explored the psychological and historical

roots and consequences of monist and pluralist visions of the world.

xiv

INT R ODUCTION

He has argued that the great totalitarian structures built on Hegelian

and Marxist foundations are not a terrible aberration, but rather a

logical development of the major assumption in all the central currents

of western political thought: that there is a fundamental unity underlying all phenomena, deriving from a single universal purpose. This can be discovered, according to some, through scientific inquiry,

according to others, through religious revelation, or through metaphysical speculation. When discovered, it will provide men with a final solution to the question of how to live.

Though the most extreme forms of this faith, with their dehumanising visions of men as instruments of abstract historical forces, have led to criminal perversions of political practice, he emphasises that the faith

itself cannot be dismissed as the product of sick minds. It is the basis of

all traditional morality and is rooted in 'a deep and incurable metaphysical need', arising from man's sense of an inner split and his yearning for a mythical lost wholeness. This yearning for absolutes is

very often the expression of an urge to shed the burden of responsibility

for one's fate by transferring it to a vast impersonal monolithic whole

'nature, or history, or class or race, or the "harsh realities of our time",

or the irresistible evolution of the social structure, that will absorb and

integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is

senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our

certain doom'.

Berlin believes that precisely because monistic visions of reality

answer fundamental human needs, a truly consistent pluralism has been

a comparatively rare historical phenomenon. Pluralism, in the sense in

which he uses the word, is not to be confused with that which is

commonly defined as a liberal outlook-according to which all extreme

positions are distortions of true values and the key to social harmony

and a moral life lies in moderation and the golden mean. True

pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and

intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be

finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another,

without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. Moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria,

between incompatible but equally desirable values.

This permanent possibility of moral uncertainty is, in his view, the

XV

RUSSIAN THINKERS

price that must be paid for recognition of the true nature of one's freedom: the individual's right to self-direction, as opposed to direction by state or church or party, is plainly of supreme importance if one holds

that the diversity of human goals and aspirations cannot be evaluated by

any universal criteria, or subordinated to some transcendent purpose.

But he maintains that, although this belief is implicit in some humanist

and liberal attitudes, the consequences of consistent pluralism are so

painful and disturbing, and so radically undermine some of the central

and uncritically accepted assumptions of the western intellectual tradition, that they are seldom fully articulated. In seminal essays on Vico, Machiavelli and Herder, and in 'Historical Inevitability', he has shown

that those few thinkers who spelt out the consequences of pluralism

have been consistently misunderstood, and their originality undervalued.

In his Four Essays on Liberty he suggests that pluralist visions of the

world are frequently the product of historical claustrophobia, during

periods of intellectual and social stagnation, when a sense of the intolerable cramping of human faculties by the demand for conformity generates a demand for 'more light', an extension of the areas of

individual responsibility and spontaneous action. But, as the dominance

of monistic doctrines throughout history shows, men are much more

prone to agoraphobia: and at moments of historical crisis, when the

necessity of choice generates fears and neuroses, men are eager to trade

the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions,

conservative or radical, which give them 'the peace of imprisonment, a

contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in

the cosmos'. He points out that the craving for certainties has never

been stronger than at the present time; and his Four Essays on Liberty

are a powerful warning of the need to discern, through a deepening

of moral perceptions-a 'complex vision' of the world-the cardinal

fallacies on which such certainties rest.

Like many other liberals Berlin believes that such a deepening of

perceptions can be gained through a study of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution. But his conclusions are very different from theirs. With the subtle moral sense which led him to radically

new insights into European thinkers, he refutes the common view that

the Russian intelligentsia were, to a man, fanatical monists: he shows

that their historical predicament strongly predisposed them to both

types of vision of the world, the monist and the pluralist-that the

fascination of the intelligentsia derives from the fact that the most

INTRODUCTION

sensitive among them suffered simultaneously, and equally acutely,

from historical claustrophobia and from agoraphobia, so that at one

and the same time they were both strongly attracted to messianic

ideologies and morally repelled by them. The result, as he reveals, was

a remarkably concentrated self-searching which in many cases produced

prophetic insights into the great problems of our own time.

The causes of that extreme Russian agoraphobia which generated a

succession of millenarian political doctrines are well known: in the

political reaction following the failure of the revolution of 1 825, which

had sought to make Russia a constitutional state on the western model,

the small westernised intellectual elite became deeply alienated from

their backward society. With no practical outlet for their energies, they

channelled their social idealism into a religiously dedicated search for

truth. Through the historiosophical systems of Idealist philosophy,

then at the height of its influence in Europe, they hoped to find a

unitary truth which would make sense of the moral and social chaos

around them and anchor them securely in reality.

This yearning for absolutes was one source of that notorious consistency which, as Berlin points out, was the most striking characteristic of Russian thinkers-their habit of taking ideas and concepts to their

most extreme, even absurd, conclusions: to stop before the extreme

consequences of one's reasoning was seen as a sign of moral cowardice,

insufficient commitment to the truth. But Berlin emphasises that there

was a second, conflicting motivation behind this consistency. Amongst

the westernised minority, imbued through their education and reading

with both Enlightenment and romantic ideals of liberty and human

dignity, the primitive and crushing despotism of Nicholas I produced a

claustrophobia which had no parallel in the more advanced countries

of Europe. As a result the intelligentsia'ssearch for absolutes began with a

radical denial of absolutes-of tradi tiona! and accepted faiths, dogmas and

institutions, political, religious and social; since these, they believed,

had distorted man's vision of himself and of his proper social relations.

As Berlin shows in his essay 'Russia and 1 848', the failure of the

European revolutions in 1 848 had the effect in Russia of accelerating

this process : it resulted among the intelligentsia in a profound distrust of

western liberal and radical ideologues and their social nostrums. For the

most morally sensitive among the intelligentsia, intellectual consistency

implied above all a process which they called 'suffering through' the

truth, the stripping off, through a painful process of inner liberation, of

all the comforting illusions and half-truths which had traditionally

xvii

R U S SIAN THINKERS

concealed or justified forms of social and moral despotism. This led to

a critique, with far-reaching implications, of the unquestioned assumptions at the base of everyday social and political conduct. This consistency, with the tensions engendered by its compound of faith and scepticism, and the insights to which it led, is the central theme of

Berlin's essays on Russian thinkers.

In a number of vivid portraits of individual thinkers, he shows that

the most outstanding members of the intelligentsia were continually

torn between their suspicion of absolutes and their longing to discover

some monolithic truth which would once and for all resolve the problems of moral conduct. Some surrendered to the latter urge: Bakunin began his political career with a famous denunciation of the tyranny of

dogmas over individuals, and ended it by demanding total adherence to

his own dogma of the wisdom of the simple peasant; and many of the

young 'nihilist' iconoclasts of the 186os accepted without question the

dogmas of a crude materialism. In other thinkers the battle was more

serious and sustained. The critic Belinsky is often cited as the archexample of the intelligentsia's inhuman fanaticism: from Hegelian principles he deduced that the despotism of Nicholas I was to be

admired, contrary to all the instincts of conscience, as the expression of

cosmic harmony. But Berlin points out, in an intensely moving study

of Belinsky, that if the longing for faith led him briefly to defend such

a grotesque proposition, his moral integrity soon drove him to reject

this blinkered vision for a fervent humanism which denounced all the

great and fashionable historiosophical systems as molochs, demanding

the sacrifice of living individuals to ideal abstractions. Belinsky

epitomises the pariLdox of Russian consistency: their desire for an ideal

which would resist all attempts at demolition led the intelligentsia to

apply themselves to the work of demolition with an enthusiasm and

lucidity which exposed the hollowness of those assumptions about

society and human nature on which the belief in absolute and universal

solutions is based. In an essay on the populist tradition which dominated

Russian radical thought in the nineteenth century, Berlin shows that

the populists were far ahead of their time in their awareness of the

dehumanising implications of contemporary liberal and radical theories

of progress, which placed such faith in quantification, centralisation,

and rationalisation of productive processes .

. Most of the intelligentsia regarded their destructive criticism as a

mere preliminary, the clearing of the ground for some great ideological

construction; Berlin sees it as thoroughly relevant to our own time,

xviii

INTR O D U CTION

when only a consistent pluralism an protect human freedom from the

depredations of the systematisers. Such a pluralism, he shows, was

fully articulated in the ideas of a thinker whose originality has hitherto

been largely overlooked-Alexander Herzen.

The founder of Russian populism, Herzen was known in the west as

a Russian radical with a Utopian faith in an archaic form of socialism.

Isaiah Berlin, in two essays on Herzen, and in introductions1 to his

greatest works, From the Other Shore and My Past and Thoughts, has

transformed our understanding of him, firmly establishing him as 'one

of Russia's three moral preachers of genius', the author of some of the

most profound of modern writings on the subject of liberty.

Like other members of the intelligentsia, Herzen had begun his

intellectual career with a search for an ideal, which he found in

socialism; he believed that the instincts of the Russian peasant would

lead to a form of socialism superior to any in the west. But he refused

to prescribe his ideal as a final solution to social problems, on the

grounds that a search for such a solution was incompatible with respect

for human liberty. At the beginning of the 184os he was attracted, like

Bakunin, to the Young Hegelians, with their belief that the way to

freedom lay through negation of the outworn dogmas, traditions and

institutions to which men habitually enslaved themselves and others.

H� espoused this rejection of absolutes with a thoroughgoing consistency equalled only by Stirner, deriving from it a deeply radical humanism. He attributed the failure of liberating movements in the

past to a fatally inconsistent tendency to idolatry on the part even of the

most radical iconoclasts, who liberate men from one yoke only to

enslave them to another. Rejection of specific forll!S of oppression never

went far enough: it failed to attack their common source-the tyranny

of abstractions over individuals. As Berlin shows, Herzen's attacks on

all deterministic philosophies of progress demonstrate how well he

understood that 'the greatest of sins that any human being can perpe-trate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to an unpredictable future order', to sanctify monstrous crimes by faith

in some remote Utopia.

Berlin emphasises that Herzen's own predicament was a very

modern one, in that he was torn between the conflicting values of

equality and excellence: he recognised the injustice of elites but valued

1 Not included in this volume. The introduction to My Past a,uJ Thoughts is

one of the essays in Against the Curren/, a forthcoming volume of the selection.

xix

RUSSIAN THIN K E R S

the- intellectual and moral freedom, and the aesthetic distinction, of

true aristocracy. But while refusing, unlike the ideologists of the left,

ro sacrifice excellence to equality, h� understood, with J. S. Mill,

something which has only become dear in our own day: that the

common mean between these values, represented by 'mass societies', is

not the best of both worlds, but more frequently, in Mill's words, an

aesthetically and Nhically repellent 'conglomerated mediocrity', the

submergence of the individual in the mass. With great conviction and

in a language as vivid and committed as Herzen's own, Berlin has

perceived and conveyed to the English reader the originality of

Herzen's belief that there are no general solutions to individual and

specific problems, only temporary expedients which must be based on

an acute sense of the uniqueness of each historical situation, and on a

high degree of responsiveness to the particular needs and demands of

diverse individuals and peoples.

Berlin's exploration of the self-searching of Russian thinkers includes studies of two writers-Tolstoy and Turgenev. These studies refute a widespread misconception about the relations between Russian

writers and thinkers: namely, that in Russia literature and radical

thought form two distinct traditions related only by mutual hostility.

Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's well-known aversion to the intelligentsia

is frequently quoted to emphasise the gulf between Russia's great

writers, who were concerned with exploring men's spiritual depths, and

the intelligentsia, materialists concerned only with the external forms

of social existence. In his essays on Tolstoy and Turgenev Berlin

shows that their art can be understood only as a product of the same

moral conflict as that experienced by the radical intelligentsia. The

essays have a dual significance: as works of criticism they offer insights

which should make a fundamental difference to our understanding of

two of Russia's greatest writers; as studies of conflicts between two

opposing visions of reality they are a significant contribution to the

·

history of ideas.

In his famous study of Tolstoy's view of history, 'The Hedgehog

and the Fox', and in the less well-known essay, 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', Berlin shows that the relation between Tolstoy's artistic vision and his moral pread:.ing may be understood as a titanic struggle

between the monist and pluralist visions of reality. Tolstoy's 'lethal

nihilism' led him to denounce the pretensions of all theories, dogmas

and systems to explain, order or predict the complex and contradictory

phenomena of history and social existence, but the driving force of this

XX

INTR O D U C T I ON

nihilism was a passionate longing to discover one unitary truth,

encompassing all existence and impregnable to attack. He was thus

constantly in contradiction with himself, perceiving reality in its

multiplicity but believing only in 'one vast, unitary whole'. In his art

he expressed an unsurpassed feeling for the irreducible variety of

phenomena, but in his moral preaching he advocated simplification,

reduction to one single level, that of the Russian peasant or the simple

Christian ethic. In some of the most psychologically delicate and

revealing passages ever written on Tolstoy, Berlin shows that his

tragedy was that his sense of reality was too strong to be compatible

with any of the narrow ideals he set up; the conclusions articulated in

Herz.en's writings were demonstrated in the tragedy of Tolstoy's life:

his inability, despite the most desperate attempts, to harmonise opposing

but equally valid goals and attitudes. Yet his failure, his inability to

resolve his inner contradictions, gives Tolstoy a moral stature apparent

even to those most mystified or repelled by the content of his preaching.

Few writers would seem to have less in common than Tolstoy, the

fanatical seeker after truth, and Turgenev, a writer of lyrical prose, the

poet of 'the last enchantments of decaying country houses'. But in his

essay on Turgenev Berlin shows that though by temperament he was a

liberal, repelled by dogmatic narrowness and opposed to extreme

solutions, he had been deeply inRuenced in his youth by the moral

commitment of his contemporaries and their opposition to the injustices

of autocracy. He fully accepted his friend Belinsky's belief that the

artist cannot remain a neutral observer in the battle between justice and

injustice, but must dedicate himself, like all decent men, to the search

to establish and proclaim the truth. The effect of this was to tum

Turgenev's liberalism into something quite distinct from the European

liberalism of that time, much less confident and optimistic, but more

modem. In his novels, which chronicled the development of the

intelligentsia, he examined the controversies of the middle years of the

nineteenth century between Russian radicals and conservatives,

moderates and extremists, exploring with great scrupulousness and

moral perception the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and

groups, and of the doctrines by which they were possessed. Berlin

emphasises that the originality of Turgenev's liberalism lay in the

conviction which he shared with Herzen (even though he thought that

Herzen's populism was his last illusion) as against Tolstoy and the

revolutionaries (even though he admired their single-mindedness), that

there was no final solution to the central problems of society. In an age

xxi

RUS SIAN THINKERS

when liberals and radicals alike were complacent in their faith in the

inevitability of progress, when political choices seemed mapped out in

advance by inexorable historical forces-the laws governing economic

markets, or the con8ict of social classes-which could be made to

assume responsibility for their results, Turgenev perceived the hollowness of the certainties invoked by liberals to justify the injustices of the existing order, or by radicals to justify its merciless destruction. He thus

anticipated the predicament of the radical humanist in our century,

which one of the most morally sensitive political thinkers of our time,

Leszek Kolakowski, has described as a continual agony of choice

between the demands of Solltn and Stin, value and fact:

The same question recurs repeatedly, in different versions: how can

we prevent the alternatives of Sollm-Stin from becoming polarizations of utopianism-opportunism, romanticism-conservatism, purposeless madness versus collaboration with crime masquerading as sobriety? How can we avoid the fatal choice between the Scylla of

duty, crying its arbitrary slogans, and the Charybdis of compliance

with the existing world, which transforms itself into voluntary

approval of its most dreadful products? How to avoid this choice,

given the postulate-which we consider essential-that we are never

able to measure truly and accurately the limits of what we call

'historical necessity'? And that we are, consequendy, never able to

decide with certainty which concrete fact of social life is a component of historical destiny and what potentials are concealed in existing reality.

Kolakowski's formulation of this dilemma of our time is surely

valid. Yet Turgenev, a thinker of a very different type, faced it over

a century ago. Before proponents of one-sided visions, conservative

or Utopian, possessed the technological equipment for experiments on

limidess human material, it was not so difficult as it is now to defend

the view that one or other extreme vision, or even a middle way between

them, was the whole answer. Isaiah Berlin has shown that, at a time

when liberals, as well as the ideologists of the left, were still confident

of the sufficiency of their systems, Turgenev had attained a more

complex vision and had embodied it in his art.

There is no doubt with which of the three figures with whom he

deals in most detail Berlin's greatest sympathies lie. He shows us that,

for all Tolstoy's moral grandeur, his blindness at those moments when

he relinquishes the humane vision of his art for a domineering dogmatism is repellent; and that Turgenev, for all the clarity of his vision, xxii

INTR O D U CT I ON

his intelligence and sense of reality, lacked the courage and moral

commitment which he so much admired in the radical intelligentsia:

his vacillation between alternatives was too often a state of 'agreeable

and sympathetic melancholy', ultimately dispassionate and detached.

It is with Herz.en that Berlin has the greatest affinity (although he

points out that there was substance in Turgenev's assertion that

Herzen never succeeded in ridding himself of one illusion- his faith i n

the 'peasant sheepskin coat'); he ended his Inaugural Lecture, 'Two

Concepts of Liberty', with a quotation from an author whom he did

not identify: 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and

yet stand for them unRinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man

from a barbarian.' Herzen, who, as he shows, had the subtle vision of a

Turgenev together with a self-sacrificing commitment to the truth

which was the equal of Tolstoy's, was in this sense both brave and

civilised. In his understanding that 'one of the deepest of modern

disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities', he

possessed to a very high degree that consistent pluralism of outlook

which for Berlin is the essence of political wisdom.

It is often said of the Russians that their national peculiarity consists in

expressing in a particularly extreme fashion certain universal characteristics of the human condition; and for many the historical significance of the Russian intelligentsia derives from the fact that they embodied the human thirst for absolutes in a pathologically exaggerated

form. Berlin's essays present us with a very different and much more

complex interpretation of the intelligentsia's 'universality', showing

that for a variety of historical reasons they embodied not one, but at

least two fundamental, and opposing, human urges. The urge to assert

the autonomy of the self through revolt against necessity continually

clashed with their demand for certainties, leading them to sharp

perceptions of moral, social and aesthetic problems which in this

century have come to be regarded as of central importance.

That this aspect of their thought has aroused so little attention in

the west is due in some measure to the glaring intellectual defects of the

writings of most members of the intelligentsia. The repetitiousness, the

incoherence, the proliferation of half-digested ideas from foreign

sources in the writings of men like Belinsky, together with the political

disasters for which they are held responsible, have led the majority of

western scholars fervently to echo Chaadaev's famous pronouncement

that if Russia has some universal lesson to give to the world, it is that its

xxiii

R U S SIAN THINKER S

example is at all costs to be avoided. But with an acute instinct for

quality, helped by a total absence of that condescension which is the

frequent concomitant of historical hindsight, Isaiah Berlin has discerned behind the formal shortcomings of the intelligentsia's writings a moral passion worthy of attention and respect. The essays in this book

are a vindication of the belief which he has preached to his English

audience over many years: that enthusiasm for ideas is not a failing or

a vice; that on the contrary, the evils of narrow and despotic visions of

the world can be effectively resisted only through an unswerving moral

and intellectual clarity of vision that can penetrate to and expose the

hidden implications and extreme consequences of social and political

ideals.

As he points out in his Four Essays on Liberty, no philosopher has

ever succeeded in finally proving or refuting the determinist proposition that subjective ideals have no influence on historical events: but the essays in this book, with their deep perception of the moral essence

of a man as the source of his humanity, of the way in which ideals are

'lived through' in inner conflicts, argue more powerfully than any

logical demonstration in support of the belief which penetrates all

Isaiah Berlin's writings: that men are morally free and are (more often

than the determinists who hold the field believe) able to influence

events for good or evil through their freely held ideals and convictions.

AILEEN KELLY

xxiv

T H .E year 1 848 is not usually considered to be a landmark in Russian

history. The revolutions of that year, which seemed to Herzen like

a life-giving storm on a sultry day, did not reach the Russian Empire.

The drastic changes of policy on the part of the imperial government

after the suppression of the Decembrist rising in 1825 seemed all too

effective: literary storms like the Chaadaev affair in 1836, the loose

student talk for which Herzen and his friends were punished, even

minor peasant disorders in the early 40s in remote provincial districts,

were easily disposed of; in 1848 itself not a ripple disturbed the peace

of the vast and still expanding empire. The gigantic straitjacket of

bureaucratic and military control which, if not devised, was reinforced and pulled tighter by Nicholas I, appeared despite frequent cases of stupidity or corruption to be conspicuously successful.

There was nowhere any sign of effective independent thought or

action.

Eighteen years earlier, in 1830, the news from Paris had put new

life into Russian radicals; French Utopian socialism made a deep

impression on Russian social thought; the Polish rebellion became the

rallying point of democrats everywhere, very much as did the republic

in the Spanish civil war a century later. But the rebellion was crushed,

and all embers of the great conflagration, at any rate so far as open

expression was concerned, were by 1848 virtually stamped out-in St

Petersburg no less than in Warsaw. To observers in western Europe,

sympathetic and hostile alike, . the autocracy seemed unshakeable.

Nevertheless the year 1848 is a turning-point in the development of

Russia as of Europe, not only because of the decisive part played in

subsequent Russian history by revolutionary socialism, heralded by the

Manifesto composed by Marx and Engels to celebrate its birth; but

more immediately because of the effect which the failure of the

European revolution was destined to have upon Russian public opinion,

and in particular upon the Russian revolutionary movement. At the

time, however, this could scarcely have been foreseen: well might a

sober p(>lirical observer-a Granovsky or Koshelev-feel gloomy about

I

R U S SIAN THINKERS

the possibility of even moderate reforms; revolution seemed too remote

to contemplate.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the 184os, even among the bolder

spirits, except perhaps Bakunin and one or two members of the

Petrashevsky circle, counted on the possibility of an immediate revolution in Russia. The revolutions that broke out in Italy, France, Prussia and the Austrian Empire had been made by more or less

organised political parties, openly opposed to the existing regimes.

These were composed of, or acted in coalition with, radical or socialist

intellectuals, were led by prominent democrats identified with recognised political and social doctrines and sects, and found support among the liberal bourgeoisie, or from frustrated national _movements at

various stages of development and animated by different ideals. They

tended also to draw a good deal of strength from disaffected workers

and peasants. None of these elements was articulate or organised in

Russia in any sense resembling the situation in the west. Parallels

between Russian and western European development are always liable

to be superficial and misleading, but if a C!)mparison is to be drawn at

all the eighteenth century in Europe offers a closer analogy. The

opposition of Russian liberals and radicals which, after the severe

repressions following the Decembrist rising, began to grow bolder and

more articulate in the middle 30s and early 40s, resembled the guerrilla

warfare against the Church and absolute monarchy conducted by the

Encyclopedists in France or by the leaders of the German Aufkliirung,

far more than the mass organisations and popular movements in western

Europe of the nineteenth century. The Russian liberals and radicals of

the 30s and 40s, whether they confined themselves to philosophical or

aesthetic issues, like the circle gathered round Stankevich, or concerned

themselves with political and social issues, like Herzen and Ogarev,

remained isolated lumieres, a small and highly self-conscious intellectual

elite; they met and argued and influenced each other in the drawingrooms and salons of Moscow or St Petersburg, but they had no popular support, no widely extended political or social framework either in the

form of political parties or even in the kind of unofficial but widespread

middle-class opposition which had preceded the great French Revolution. The scattered Russian intellectuals of this period had no middle class to lean upon, nor could they look for help from the peasantry.

'The people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution-that is desired only by educated townspeople who are quite powerless,' wrote Belinsky to his friends in 1846. And this was

2

R U S S IA AND 1 8 4 8

echoed thirteen years later by Chernyshevsky in a characteristic

hyperbole: 'There is no European country in which the vast majority

of the people is not absolutely indifferent to the rights which are the

object of desire and concern only to the liberals.'1 While this was

scarcely true of most of western Europe, then or earlier, it reflected

the backward state of Russia accurately enough. Until the economic

development of the Russian Empire created industrial and labour

problems and with them a middle class and a proletariat of the western

type, the democratic revolution remained a dream: and when such

conditions finally materialised, as they did with increasing tempo in

the last decades of the nineteenth century, the revolution did not lag

far behind. The 'Russian 1 848' occurred in that country in 1905,

by which time the middle class in the west was no longer revolutionary

or even militantly reformist; and this time-lag of half a century was·

itself a powerful factor in causing the final cleavage between liberal

and authoritarian socialism in 1 9 1 7, and the fatal divergence of paths

between Russia and Europe which followed. Perhaps F. I. Dan was

right in supposing that this was the parting of the ways which Herzen

had in mind when, addressing Edgar Quinet, he declared, 'You [will

go] by way of the proletariat towards socialism; we by way of socialism

to freedom.'2 The difference in the degree of political maturity

between Russia and the west at this period is vividly described in the

introduction to Letttrs from Franct and Italy which Herzen composed

in his Putney exile. His topic is the revolution of 1 848 in western

Europe:

The liberals, those political Protestants, became in their turn the

most fearful conservatives; behind the altered charters and con"'

stitutions they have discovered the spectre of socialism and have

grown pale with terror; nor is this surprising for they . . . have

something to lose, something to be afraid of. But we [Russians] are

not in that position at all. Our attitude to all public affairs is much

simpler and more naive.

The liberals are afraid of losing their liberty-we have none;

they are nervous of interference by governments in the industrial

sphere-with us the government interferes with everything anyhow;

they are afraid oflosing their personal rights-we have yet to acquire

them.

1 Quoted by F. I. Dan, Proislthozlulenit 6o/s�iZIIffl (New York, 1946),

PP· 36, 39·

1 Ko/oltol, No z 1o (1 December 1 865); referred to by Dan, ibid.

3

R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S

The extreme contradictions of our still disordered existence, the

lack of stability in all our legal and constitutional notions, on the

one hand makes possible the most unlimited despotism, serfdom and

military settlements, and on the other creates conditions in which

such revolutionary steps as those of Peter I and Alexander II are

less difficult. A man who lives in furnished rooms finds it far

easier to move than one who has acquired a house of his own.

Europe is sinking because it cannot rid itself of its cargo-that

infinity of treasures accumulated in distant and perilous expeditions.

In our case, all this is artificial ballast; out with it and overboard,

and then full sail into the open sea ! We are entering history full of

strength and energy at precisely the moment when all political

parties are becoming faded anachronisms, and everyone is pointing,

some hopefully, others with despair, at the approaching thundercloud of economic revolution. And so we, too, when we look at our neighbours, begin to feel frightened of the coming storm, and

like them, think it best to say nothing about this peril . . . But you

have no need to fear these terrors; calm yourselves, for on our

estate there is a lightning conductor-communal owntrship of tht /and/1

In other words, the total absence of elementary rights and liberties,

the seven dark years which followed 1 848, so far from inducing

despair or apathy, brought home to more than one Russian thinker the

sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively

liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made

the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the

strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for

Russia alone.

Herzen's analysis of the facts was quite correct. There was no

Russian bourgeoisie to speak of: the journalist Polevoy and the highly

articulate literary tea merchant, Botkin, friend of Belinsky and Turgenev, and indeed Belinsky himself, were notl'lble exceptions-social conditions for drastic liberal refonns, let alone revolution, did not exist.

Yet this very fact, which was so bitterly lamented by liberals like

Kavelin and even Belinsky, brought its own remarkable compensation.

In Europe an international revolution had broken out and failed, and

its failure created among idealistic democrats and socialists a bitter

sense of disillusion and despair. In some cases it led to cynical detachment, or else a tendency to seek comfort either in apathetic resignation, 1 A. I. Herzen, 8o6rt1t1it sochifltflii o tridtst�ti tomt�lh (Moscow, 19S+-6S),

vol. ), pp. 1 3-1 +·

4

R U SS I A AND 1 8 48

or in religion, or in the ranks of political reaction; very much as the

failure of the revolution of 1 90 5 in Russia produced the call to

repentance and spiritual values of the J?ekhi group. In Russia, Katkov

did become a conservative nationalist, Dostoevsky turned to orthodoxy,

Botkin turned his back upon radicalism, Bakunin signed a disingenuous

'confession'; but in general the very fact that Russia had suffered no

revolution, and no corresponding degree of disenchantment, led to a

development very different from that of western Europe. The important fact was that the passion for reform - the revolutionary fervour and the belief in the feasibility of change by means of public pressure,

agitation, and, as some thought, conspiracy-did not weaken. On the

contrary, it grew stronger. But the argument for a political revolution,

when its failure in the west was so glaring, clearly became less convincing. The discontented and rebellious Russian intellectuals of the next thirty years turned their attention to the peculiarities of their

own internal situation; and then, from ready-made solutions, imported

from the west and capable only of being artificially grafted on to the

recalcitrant growth provided by their own countrymen, to the creation

of new doctrines and modes of action adapted carefully to the peculiar

problems posed by Russia alone. They were prepared to learn and more

than learn-to become the most devoted and assiduous disciples of the

most advanced thinkers of western Europe, but the teachings of Hegel

and the German materialists, of Mill, Spencer and Comte, were

henceforth to be transformed to fit specifically Russian needs. Bazarov,

in Turgenev's Fathers and Childrm, for all his militant positivism

and materialism and respect for the west, has far deeper roots in Russian

soil, not without a certain self-conscious pride, than the men of the

1 84os with their genuinely cosmopolitan ideal: than, for example, the

imaginary Rudin, or indeed the supposed original of Rudin-Bakunin

himself, for all his pan-Slavism and Germanophobia.

The measures taken by the Government to prevent the 'revolutionary disease' from infecting the Russian Empire, did no doubt play a decisive part in preventing the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks:

but the important consequence of this 'moral quarantine' was to

weaken the influence of western liberalism; it forced Russian intellectuals in upon themselves and made it more difficult than before to escape from the painful issues before them into a kind of vague search

for panaceas from the west. There followed a sharp settling of internal

moral and political accounts: as hope receded of marching in step with

western liberalism, the Russian progressive movement tended to

s

R U S SIAN T H I N KERS

become increasingly inward-looking and uncompromising. The most

crucial and striking fact is that there was no inner collapse on the part

of the progressives, and both revolutionary and reformist opinion,

though it grew more nationalist, often took on a grimmer tone. It

favoured self-consciously harsh, anti-aesthetic, exaggeratedly materialistic, crude, utilitarian forms, and continued to be self-confident and optimistic, inspired by the later writings of Belinsky rather than

Herzen. There is not, even at the lowest point-during the 'seven year

long night' after 1 848-that flatness and apathy which is so noticeable

in France and Germany during these years. But this was bought at

the price of a deep schism within the intelligentsia. The new men,

Chemyshevsky and the left-wing populists, are divided by a much

wider gap from the liberals, whether of the west or of their own

country, than any of their predecessors. In the years of repression,

1 848-56, lines of demarcation grew much more real; frontiers between

the Slavophils and the Westerners, which had hitherto been easily

crossed and re-crossed, became dividing walls; the framework of

frie:tdship and mutual respect between the two camps-'the Janus with

two faces but one heart'-which had made it possible for radicals like

Belinsky and Herzen to argue furiously but in an atmosphere of deep

regard, in some cases even of affection, with Katkov or Khomyakov

or the Aksakov brothers, no longer existed. When Herzen and

Chicherin met in London in 1 8 59, Herzen saw in him not an

opponent but an enemy, and with reason. There was an even more

painful process of polarisation in the radical camp itself. The quarrel

between the moderates of Kolokol (Tht Btl/) and the St Petersburg

radicals in the 6os grew bitter. Despite the continued existence of a

common enemy-the Imperial police state-the old solidarity was

fatally broken. Chernyshevsky's meeting with Herzen in London was

a stiff, awkward and almost formal affair. The gulf between what

became the left- and the right-wing oppositions grew steadily wider;

and this despite the fact that the left wing regarded western ideals far

more critically than before, and like the right looked for salvation to

native institutions and a specifically Russian solution, losing faith in

universal remedies, compounded out of liberal or socialist doctrines

'

imported from the west.

Thus it came about that, when at last direct western influence had

again reasserted itself in the form of the orthodox Marxism of the

Russian social democrats of the 1 89os, the revolutionary intelligentsia

was unbroken by the collapse of liberal hopes in Europe in 1 849-5 1 .

6

RUSSIA AND 1 8 48

Its beliefs and principles were preserved from contamination by the

very hostility of the regime, and remained free from the danger,

prevalent among their old allies in the west, of growing soft and blurred

as a result of too much successful compromise, mingled with disillusion.

Consequently, during the time of almost universal malaise among

socialists, the Russian left-wing movement retained its ideals and its

fighting spirit. It had broken with liberalism out of strength and not

out of despair. It had created and nurtured its own tough-minded,

radical, agrarian tradition, and it was an army ready to march. Some

of the factors responsible for this trend-the independent development

of Russian radicalism as it was born in the stonns of 1 848-9-may be

worth recalling.

Tsar Nicholas I remained all his life obsessed by the Decembrist

rising. He saw himself as the ruler appointed by Providence to save

his people from the horrors of atheism, liberalism and revolution; and

being an absolute autocrat in fact as well as in name, he made it the

first aim of his government to eliminate every form of political

heterodoxy or opposition. Nevertheless, even the severest censorship,

the sharpest political police, will tend to relax its attention to some

degree after twenty years of relative quiet; in this case the long peace

had been disturbed only by the Polish rebellion, with no signs of

serious internal conspiracy anywhere, and no greater dangers to the

regime th;m a few small and localised peasant disorders, two or three

groups of radical-minded university students, a handful of westernising

professors and writers, with here and there an odd defender of the

Roman Church like Chaadaev, or an actual convert to Rome like the

eccentric ex-professor of Greek, the Redemptorist Father Pecherin.

As a result of this, in the middle 40s the liberal journals, such as

Ottchestvmnye zapiski (Notts of tht Fatherland) or Sovrtmmnik (Tht

Conttmporary), took courage and began to print, not indeed articles in

open opposition to the government-with the existing censorship and

under the sharp eye of General Dubelt of the political police, this was

out of the question-but articles ostensibly concerned with conditions

in western Europe or in the Ottoman Empire, and written in an

apparently dispassionate manner; but containing, for those who could

read between the lines, vague hints and concealed allusions critical of

the existing regime. The centre of attraction to all progressive spirits

was, of course, Paris, the home of all that was most advanced and

freedom-loving in the world, the home of socialists and Utopians, of

Leroux and Cabet, of George Sand and Proudhon-the centre of a

7

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

revolutionary art and literature, which i n the course of time were

bound to lead humanity towards freedom and happiness.

Saltykov-Shchedrin, who belonged to a typical liberal circle of the

40s, says in a famous passage of his memoirs:•

In Russia, everything seemed finished, sealed with five seals and

consigned to the Post Office for delivery to an addressee whom it

was beforehand decided not to find; in France, everything seemed

to be beginning . . . our (French] sympathies became particularly

intense towards 1 848. With unconcealed excitement we watched

all the periptteias of the drama provided by the last years of Louis

Philippe's reign. With passionate enthusiasm we read The History

of Ten Years, by Louis Blanc . . . : Louis Philippe and Guizot,

Duchatel and Thiers-these men were almost personal enemies,

perhaps more dangerous than even L. V. Dubelt.

The Russian censorship had evidently not at this period reached its

maximum severity; the censors were themselves at times inclined

towards a timid kind of right-wing liberalism; in any case they were

often no match for the ingenuity and, above all, unending persistence

of the 'disloyal' historians and journalists, and inevitably they let

through a certain amount of 'dangerous thought'. Those zealous

watchdogs of autocracy, the editors Bulgarin and Grech, who acted

as virtual agents of the political police, often denounced such oversights in private reports to their masters. But the Minister of Education, Count Uvarov, author of the celebrated patriotic triple watchword 'Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people', who could scarcely be accused of liberal leanings, was nevertheless anxious not to acquire

the reputation of a bigoted reactionary, and turned a blind eye to the

less blatant manifestations of independent writing. By western

standards, the censorship was exceptionally severe; Belinsky's letters,

for example, make quite plain the extent to which the censors managed

to mutilate his articles; nevertheless, liberal journals contrived to

survive in St Petersburg, and that in itself, to those who remembered

the years immediately following 1 82 5 and knew the temper of the

Emperor, was remarkable enough. The limits of freedom were, of

course, exceedingly narrow; the most arresting Russian social document of this period, apart from the writings of the emigres, was Belinsky's open letter to Gogol denouncing his book Selected Extracts

1 'Za rubezhom', Pobrot Jolmmit Jocltirmrii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1933-

1 94 1 ), vol. 14. p. 16z.

8

R U S S IA AND 1 84 8

from a Corrtspondtnct with Frimds, and that remained unpublished in

Russia in its full version until 19 I 7. And no wonder, for it was an

exceptionally eloquent and savage onslaught on the regime, inveighing

violently against the Church, the social system and the arbitrary

authority of the Emperor and his officials, and accusing Gogo! of

traducing the cause of liberty and civilisation as well as the character

and the needs of his enslaved and helpless country. This celebrated

philippic, written in I 84-7, was secretly circulated in manuscript far

beyond the confines of Moscow or St Petersburg. Indeed, it was

largely for reading this letter aloud at a private gathering of disaffected

persons that Dostoevsky was condemned to death and so nearly

executed two years later. In I 843 subversive French doctrines were,

so Annenkov tells us, openly discussed in the capital : the police official,

Liprandi, found forbidden western texts openly displayed in the bookshops. In the year I 847, Henen, Belinsky and Turgenev met Bakunin and other Russian political emigre. in Paris-their new moral

and political experiences found some echo in the radical Russian press;

this year marks the highest point of relative toleration on the part of

the censorship. The revolution of I 848 put an end to all this for

some years to come.

The story is familiar and may be found in Shilder.1 Upon receipt

of the news of the abdication of Louis Philippe and the declaration of

a republic in France, the Emperor Nicholas, feeling that his worst

forebodings about the instability of European regimes were about to

be fulfilled, decided to take immediate action. According to Grimm's

(almost certainly apocryphal) account, as soon as he heard the disastrous news from Paris, he drove to the palace of his son, the future Tsar Alexander II, where an eve-of-Lent ball was in progress.

Bursting into the ballroom, he stopped the dancers with an imperious

gesture, cried 'Gentlemen, saddle your horses, a republic has been

proclaimed in France !' and with a group of courtiers swept out of the

room. Whether or not this dramatic episode ever occurred-Shilder

does not believe it-it conveys the general atmosphere accurately

enough. Prince Petr Volkonsky at about this time told V. I. Panaev

that the Tsar seemed bent on declaring a preventive war in Europe

and was only stopped by lack of money. As it was, large reinforce-

1 N. K. Shilder, lmptrator Nikolay PtrOJi, tgo :r.Aiu' i tsarslfJIJtJatrit

(St Petenburg, 1903), 'Primechaniya i prilozheniya ko vtoromu tomu'

('Notes and Supplements to Volume 2'), pp. 619-2 1 .

9

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

ments were sent to guard the 'western provinces', i.e. Poland. That

unhappy country, broken not only by the savage repression of the

rebellion of 1 83 1 , but by the measures taken after the Galician

peasant rising in 1 846, did not stir. But Polish liberty was being

acclaimed, and Russian autocracy denounced, as a matter of course,

at every liberal banquet in Paris and elsewhere; and, although this

awoke no echo in Warsaw, then under the heel of Paskevich, the

Tsar suspected treason everywhere. Indeed, one of the principal

reasons why such importance was attached to the capture of Bakunin

was the Tsar's belief that he was in close touch with Polish emigreswhich was true-and that they were plotting a new Polish mutiny in which Bakunin was involved- which was false-although Bakunin's

extravagant public utterances may have lent some colour to such a

supposition. Bakunin at the time of his imprisonment seems to have

been entirely unaware of this obsession on the part of the Tsar and

therefore ignorant throughout of what was expected of him. He failed

to include the non-existent Polish plot in his otherwise imaginative

and altogether too accommodating confession. Soon after the outbreak

in Berlin, the Tsar published a manifesto, i n which he declared that

the wave of mutiny and chaos had fortunately not reached the impregnable frontiers of the Russian Empire; that he would do everything in his power to stop this spreading of the political plague, and that he

felt certain that all his loyal subjects would, at such a moment, rally

to him in order to avert the danger to the throne and to the Church.

The Chancellor, Count Nesselrode, caused an inspired commentary

on the Tsar's manifesto to appear in the 'Journal de St Pltershourg,

seeking to mitigate its bellicose tone. Whatever the effect on Europe,

in Russia the commentary seems to have deceived no one: it was

known that Nicholas had drafted the manifesto with his own hand,

and had read it to Baron Korf with tears in his eyes. Korf too was

apparently almost reduced to tears1 and at once destroyed the draft

which he had been commissioned to prepare, as unworthy. The heirapparent, Alexander, when he read the manifesto to a meeting of guards officers, was overcome by emotion; Prince Orlov, the head of

the gendarmerie, was no less deeply moved. The document stimulated

a genuine surge of patriotic feeling, although this does not appear to

have lasted long. The Tsar's policy corresponded to some degree with

1 See Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note I above), on which the account of this

episode is based.

J O

R U S S IA AND 1 84 8

popular feeling, at any rate among th e upper and official �. I n

1 849, Russian armies, commanded by Paskevich, crushed the revolution in Hungary; Russian influence played a major part in the suppression of the revolution in the other provinces of the Austrian Empire and in Prussia; the power of Russia in Europe, and the terror

and hatred which it inspired in the breast of every liberal and constitutionalist beyond its borders, reached their zenith. Russia was to the democrats of this period very much what the fascist powers were

in our own time: the arch-enemy of freedom and enlightenment, the

reservoir of darkness, cruelty and oppression, the land most frequently,

most violently denounced by its own exiled sons, the sinister power,

served by innumerable spies and informers, whose hidden hand was

discovered in every political development unfavourable to the growth

of national or individual liberty in Europe. This wave of liberal

indignation confirmed Nicholas in his conviction that, by his example,

no less than by his exertions, he had saved Europe from moral and

political ruin: his duty had at all times been plain to him; he carried

it out methodically and ruthlessly, unmoved by either flattery or

abuse.

The effect of the revolution on internal affairs in Russia was

immediate and powerful. All plans for agrarian reform, and in particular all proposals for the alleviation of the condition of the serfs, both private and state-owned, not to speak of plans for their liberation

to which the Emperor had at one time given much sympathetic

consideration, were abruptly dropped. For many years it had been a

commonplace, and not in liberal circles alone, that agricultural slavery

was an economic as well as a social evil. Count Kiselev, whom

Nicholas trusted and had invited to be his 'Agrarian Chief of Staff',

held this view strongly, and even the landowners and the reactionary

bureaucrats who did their best to put difficulties in the pa.th of positive

reform had not, for some years, thought it profitable to question the

evil of the system itself. Now, however, the lead given by Gogo! in his

unfortunate Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends was

followed in one or two government-approved school textbooks which

went further than the most extreme Slavophils, and began to represent

serfdom as divinely sanctioned, and resting on the same unshkeable

foundation as other patriarchal Russian institutions-as sacred in its

own way as the divine right of the Tsar himself. Projected reforms of

local government were likewise discontinued. The 'hydra of revolution' was threatening the Empire, and internal enemies, as so often I I

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

in the history of Russia, were therefore to be handled with exemplary

severity. The first step taken was connected with censorship.

The steady stream of secret denunciation which issued from

Bulgarin and Grech at last had its effect. Baron Korf and Prince

Menshikov almost simultaneously, it appears, compiled memoranda

giving instances of the laxity of the censorship and the dangerous

liberal tone to be found in the periodical press. The Emperor declared

himself shocked and indignant that this had not been detected earlier.

A committee under Menshikov was immediately set up with instructions to look into the activities of the censors and tighten up existing regulations. This committee summoned the editors of SfJ'IJT"tmmnik

and of Otechesroennye zapisn and reproved them strongly for 'general

unsoundness'. The latter changed its tone, and its editor-publisher

Kraevsky produced in 1 849 a him pmstmt article denouncing western

Europe and all its works, and offering the government a degree of

sycophantic adulation at that time unknown even in Russia, and

scarcely to be found in Bulgarin's subservient St'Utrnaya pchela (Tht

Northern Btt). As for SD'UT"tmmnilt, its most effective contributor

Belinsky, whom nothing could corrupt or silence, had died early in

1 848.1 Henen and Bakunin were in Paris, Granovsky was too mild

and too unhappy to protest. Of major literary figures in Russia

Nekrasov was left almost alone to continue the fight; by displaying

his extraordinary agility and skill in dealing with officials, and by

lying low for a good many months, he managed to survive and even

publish, and so formed the living link between the proscribed radicals

of the 405 and the new and more fanatical generation, tried and

hardened by persecution, which carried on the struggle in the sos and

6os. The Menshikov Committee was duly superseded by a secret

committee (the Emperor was in the habit of submitting critical issues

to secret committees, which often worked at cross-purposes in ignor-

1 There is a story still to be found in the latest Soviet lives of the great

critic that at the time of his death a warrant had gone out for his arrest, and

it is true that Du belt later said that he regretted his death, as otherwise 'we

would have rotted him in a fortress' (M. K. Lemke, NiltolllffJsltit zho11tiormy

i liltroturo s826-s855 gotiw, 2nd ed. [St Petersburg, 1909], p. 190). But

Lemke has conclusively shown that no such warrant had ever been signed and

that the invitation to Belinsky to visit Dubelt, which had largely inspired the

story, was due mainly to a desire of the Third Department to get a specimen

of his handwriting in order to compare it with <hat of a subversive anonymous

letter circulating at the time (ibid., pp. 1 87-90).

1 2.

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

ance of each other's existence) headed by Buturlin, and later by

Annenkov-commonly known as the 'Second of April Committee'.

Its duty was not that of pre-<:ensorship (which continued to be performed by censors under the direction of the Ministry of Education) but of scrutinising matter already published, with instructions to report

any trace of'unsoundness' to the Emperor himself, who undertook to

execute the necessary punitive measures. This committee was linked

with the political police through the ubiquitous Dubelt. It worked

with blind and relentless zeal, ignoring all other departn:ents and

institutions, and at one point, in an excess of enthusiasm, actually

denounced a satirical poem approved by the Tsar himself.1 By going

with a fine comb through every word published in the none too

numerous periodical press, it succeeded in virtually stiBing all forms of

political and social criticism- indeed everything but the conventional

expressions of unlimited loyalty to the autocracy and the Orthodox

Church. This proved too much even for Uvarov, and, on the plea of

ill-health, he resigned from the Ministry of Education. His successor

was an obscure nobleman- Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov,8 who had

submitted a memorandum to the Tsar, pointing out that one of the

mainsprings of disaffection was undoubtedly the freedom of philosophical speculation permitted in the Russian universities. The Emperor accepted this thesis and appointed him to his post with

express instructions to reform university teaching by introducing

stricter observance of the precepts of the Orthodox faith, and in

particular by the elimination of philosophical or other dangerous

leanings. This medieval mandate was carried out in the spirit and

the letter and led to a 'purge' of education which exceeded even the

notorious 'purification' of the University of Kazan ten years earlier

by Magnitsky. 1 848 to 1 855 is the darkest hour in the night of

Russian obscurantism in the nineteenth century. Even the craven and

sycophantic Grech, torn by anxiety to please the authorities,

whose letters from Paris in 1 848 denounce the mildest liberal measures

of the Second Republic with a degree of scorn hardly equalled by

Benkendorf himself-even this poor creature in his autobiographfl

written in the sos complains with something approaching bitter-

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note 1 above).

• 'Shikhmatov is Shakhmat [checkmate) to all education' was a popuJar

pun in St Petenburg.

• N. I. Grech, Ztlpisli o moti zhizni (Moscow, 1930).

1 3

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

ness about the stupidities of the new double censorship. Perhaps

the most vivid description of this literary 'White Terror' is the

well-known passage in the memoirs of the populist writer Gleb

Uspensky.1

One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous

to give any sign of thought-of the fact that you were' not afraid; on

the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared,

trembling, even when there was no real ground for it-that is what

those years have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear . . .

was then in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed

it of all desire or capacity for thought • . . There was not a single

point oflight on the horizon- 'You are lost,' cried heaven and earth,

air and water, man and beast-and everything shuddered and fled

from disaster into the first available rabbit hole.

Uspensky's account is borne out by other evidence, perhaps most

vividly by the behaviour of Chaadaev. In 1 848, this remarkable man,

no longer a 'certified lunatic', was still living in Moscow. The

Te/esltop debacle of 1 836 had spread his fame. He seemed unbroken

by his misfortune. His pride, his originality, and his independence, the

charm and brilliance of his conversation, but above all his reputation

as a martyr in the cause of intellectual liberty, attracted and fascinated

even his political opponents. His salon was visited by both Russian

and eminent foreign visitors, who testify that until the blow fell in

1 848, he continued to express his pro-western sympathies with an

uncompromising and (considering the political atmosphere) astonishing

degree of freedom. The more extreme members of the Slavophil

brotherhood, especially the poet Y azykov, 1 attacked him from time

to time, and on one occasion virtually denounced him to the political

police. But his prestige and popularity were still so great that the

Third Department did not touch him, and he continued to receive a

variety of distinguished personalities, both Russian and foreign, in his

weekly salon. In 1 847 he expressed himself strongly against Gogol's

Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends and i n a letter

to Alexander Turgenev damned it as a symptom of megalomania on

the part of that unhappy genius. Chaadaev was not a liberal, still

less a revolutionary: he was, if anything, a romantic conservative, an

1 G. I. Uspensky, Sod1iM11iya (St Petersburg, 1 889), vol. 1, pp. 175-6.

1 See the account in M. K. Lemke, op. cit. (p. u, note 1 above), p. 451.

14

R U S SIA AND 1 8 4 8

admirer of the Roman Church and the western tradition, and an

aristocratic opponent of the Slavophil obsession with eastern orthodoxy and Byzantium; he was a figure of the right, not the left, but he was an avowed and fearless critic of the regime. He was admired

above all for his individualism, his unbreakable will, his incorruptible

purity and strength of character, and his proud refusal to bend to

authority. In 1 849, this paladin of western civilisation suddenly wrote

to Khomyakov that Europe was in chaos, and in deep need of Russian

help, and spoke with much enthusiasm of the Emperor's bold initiative

in crushing the Hungarian revolution. While this might have been

put down to the horror of popular risings felt by many intellectuals at

this time, this is not the end of the story. In 1 8 5 1 , Herzen published

a book abroad containing a passionate encomium of Chaadaev.1 As

soon as he heard of it, Chaadaev wrote to the head of the political

police, saying that he had learnt with annoyance and indignation that

he had been praised by so notorious a miscreant, and followed this with

sentiments of the most abject loyalty to the Tsar as an instrument of

the divine will sent to restore order in the world. To his nephew and

confidant, who asked him 'Pourquoi cette bassesse gratuite?', he

merely observed that, after all, 'One must save one's skin.' This act

of apparently cynical self-abasement on the part of the proudest and

most liberty-loving man in Russia of his time is tragic evidence of the

effect of protracted repression upon those members of the older

generation of aristocratic rebels who, by some miracle, had escaped

Siberia or the gallows.

This was the atmosphere in which the famous Petrashevsky case

was tried. Its main interest consists in the fact that it is the only

serious conspiracy under the direct influence of western ideas to be

found in Russia at that time. When Herzen heard the news, it was

'like the olive branch, which the dove brought to Noah's Ark'- the

first glimmering of hope after the Rood.2 A good deal has been written

about this case by those involved in it-among them Dostoevsky, who

was sent to Siberia for complicity in it. Dostoevsky, who in later years

detested every form of radicalism and socialism (and indeed secularism

in general) plainly tried to minimise his own part in it, and perpetrated

a celebrated caricature of revolutionary conspiracy in The Posussed.

1 Du Jlotlop�mml ties iJiti rlr?oluliotllltlirts til Ruuit (Paris, 1 8 5 1).

I A. I. Herzen, Soln-t111it sod1i1U11ii (see p. of.. note 1 above), vo]. 10,

P· 33 5·

I S

R U SS I AN T H I N KE R S

Baron Korf, one of the committee of inquiry into the Petrashevsky

affair, later said that the plot was not as serious or as widespread as

had been alleged-that it was mainly 'a conspiracy of ideas'. In the

light of later evidence, and in particular of the publication by the

Soviet Government of three volumes of documents, 1 this verdict may

be doubted. There is, of course, a sense in which there was no formal

conspiracy. All that had happened was that a certain number of

disaffected young men gathered together at regular intervals in two

or three houses and discussed the possibility of reform. It is also true

that in spite of the devotion of Butashevich-Petrashevsky himself to

the ideas of Fourier (the story that he set up a small phalanstery on

his estate for his peasants, who set fire to it almost immediately as an

invention of the devil, is unsupported by evidence) these groups were

not united by any clear body of principles accepted by them all: so,

for instance, Mombelli went no further than the desire to create

mutual aid institutions, not so much for the workers or peasants as

for members of the middle class like himself; Akhsharumov, Evropeus,

Pleshcheev were Christian Socialists; A. P. Milyukov's only crime

was apparently to have translated Lamennais. Balasoglo was a kindly

and impressionable young man, oppressed by the horrors of the Russian

social order-no more and no less than, for example, Gogo! himselfwho desired reform and improvement on mildly populist lines similar to the ideas of the more romantic Slavophils, and indeed not too unlike

the neo-medievalist nostalgia of such English writers as Cobbett, or

William Morris. Indeed, Petrashevsky's encyclopedic dictionary,

which contained 'subversive' articles disguised as scientific information,

resembles nothing so much as Cobbett's famous grammar. Nevertheless, these groups differed from the casual gatherings of such radical men of letters as Panaev, Korsh, Nekrasov and even Belinsky. Some,

at any rate, of the participants met for the specific purpose of considering concrete ideas of how to foment a rebeliion against the existing regime.

These ideas may have been impracticable, and may have contained

in them much that was fantastic drawn from the French Utopians

and other 'unscientific' sources, but their purpose was not the reform

but the overthrow of the regime, and the establishment of a . revolutionary government. Dostoevsky's descriptions in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere make it clear that Speshnev, for example, was by

1 Dtlo ptlrt�shtllltfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1937, 19-f.l, 19S 1).

J6

RU S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

temperament and intention a genuine revolutionary agitator, who

believed in conspiracy at least as seriously as Bakunin (who disliked

him) and attended these discussion groups with a practical purpose.

The portrait of him as Stavrogin in The Possessed strongly stresses

this aspect. Similarly, Durov and Grigoriev and one or two others

certainly seem to have believed that the revolution might break out

at any moment; while they realised the impossibility of organising a

mass movement, they put their faith, like Weitling and the groups

of German communist workers, and perhaps Blanqui at this period,

in the organisation of small cells of trained revolutionaries, a professional elite which could act efficiently and ruthlessly and seize the leadership when the hour struck -when the oppressed elements would

rise and crush the knock-kneed army of courtiers and bureaucrats

that alone stood between the Russian people and its freedom. No

doubt much of this was idle talk, since nothing remotely resembling

a revolutionary situation existed in Russia at this time. Nevertheless,

the intentions of these men were as concrete and as violent as those

of Babeuf and his friends, and, in the conditions of a tightly controlled

autocracy, the only possible means of practical conspiracy. Speshnev

was quite definitely-a Communist, influenced not merely by Dezamy

but perhaps also by the early works of Marx-for example, the anti

Proudhonist Misere de Ia philosophie. Balasoglo states in his evidencel

that one of the things which attracted him to Petrashevsky's discussion

group was that, on the whole, it avoided liberal patter and aimless

discussion and concerned itself with concrete issues, and conducted

statistical studies with a view to direct action. Dostoevsky's contemptuous references to the tendency of his fellow conspirators poliheral'nichat'-to play at being liberal-look mainly like an attempt to whitewash himself. In fact, the principal attraction of this circle for

Dostoevsky probably consisted precisely in that which had also

attracted Balasoglo-namely, that the atmosphere was serious and

intense, not amiably liberal, gay, informal and intimate, and given to

literary and intellectual gossip, like the lively evenings given by the

Panaevs, Sollogub or Herzen, at which he seems to have been snubbed

and had suffered acutely. Petrashevsky was a remorselessly earnest

man, and the groups, both his own and the subsidiary, even more

secret groups which sprang from it-as well as allied 'circles', for

example that to which Chernyshevsky belonged as a university student

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9• note 1 above), vol. 2.

1 7

R U S S I AN TH I N K E R S

-meant business. The conspiracy was broken up i n April 1 849• and the

Petrashevtsy were tried and sent into exile.

Between 1 849 and the death of Nicholas I in the last months of

the Crimean war, there is not a glimmering of liberal thought. Gogo!

died an unrepentant reactionary, but Turgenev, who ventured to

praise him as a satirical genius in an obituary article, was promptly

arrested for it. Bakunin was in prison, Herzen lived abroad, Belinsky

was dead, Granovsky was silent, depressed and developing Slavophil

sympathies. The centenary of Moscow University in 1 855 proved a

dismal affair. The Slavophils themselves, although they rejected the

liberal revolution and all its works, and continued a ceaseless campaign

against western inRuences, felt the heavy hand of official repression ;

the Aksakov brothers, Khomyakov, Koshelev and Samarin, fell under

official suspicion much as I van Kireevsky had done in the previous

decade. The secret police and the special committees considered all

ideas to be dangerous as such, particularly that of a nationalism which

took up the cause of the oppressed Slav nationalities of the Austrian

Empire, and by implication thereby placed itself in opposition to the

dynastic principle and to multi-racial empires. The battle between

the Government and the various opposition parties was not an ideological war, like the long conRict fought out in the 1 870s and 8os between the left and the right, between liberals, early populists and

socialists on one side, and such reactionary nationalists as, for instance,

Strakhov, Dostoevsky, Maikov, and above all Katkov and Leontiev

on the other. During 1 848-55, the Government, and the party (as it

was called) of 'official patriotism', appeared to be hostile to thought

as such, and therefore made no attempt to obtain intellectual supporters;

when volunteers offered themselves, they were accepted somewhat

disdainfully, made use of, and occasionally rewarded. If Nicholas I

made no conscious effort to fight ideas with ideas, it was because he

disliked all thought and speculation as such; he distrusted his own

bureaucracy so deeply, perhaps because he felt that it presupposed the

minimum of intellectual activity required by any form of rational

organisation.

'To those who lived through it, it seemed that this dark tunnel

was destined to lead nowhere,' wrote Herzen in the 6os. 'N evertheless, the effect of these years was by no means wholly negative.' And this is acute and true. The revolution of 1848 by its failure, by

discrediting the revolutionary intelligentsia of Europe which had been

put down so easily by the forces of law and order, was followed by a

1 8

R U S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

mood o f profound disillusionment, by a distrust of the very idea of

progress, of the possibility of the peaceful attainment of liberty and

equality by means of persuasion or indeed any civilised means open to

men of liberal convictions. Herzen himself never wholly recovered

from this collapse of his hopes and ideas. Bakunin was disoriented by

it; the older generation of liberal intellectuals in Moscow and St

Petersburg scattered, some to drift into the conservative camp, others

to seek comfort in non-political fields. But the principal effect which

the failure of 1 848 had had on the stronger natures among the

younger Russian radicals was to convince them firmly that no real

accommodation with the Tsar's government was possible-with the

result that during the Crimean war a good many of the leading

intellectuals were close to being defeatist: nor was this by any means

confined to the radicals and revolutionaries. Koshelev in his memoirs,

published in Berlin in the 8os, 1 declares that he and some of his friends

- nationalists and Slavophils-thought that a defeat would serve

RusSia's best interests, and dwells on public indifference to the outcome of the war-an admission far more shocking at the time of its publication, during the full tide of pan-Slav agitation, than the facts

themselves can have been during the Crimean war. The Tsar's

uncompromising line precipitated a moral crisis which finally divided

the tough core of the opposition from the opportunists: it caused the

former to turn in more narrowly upon themselves. This applied to

both camps. Whether they were Slavophils and rejected the west like

the Aksakovs and Samarin, or materialists, atheists and champions of

western scientific ideas like Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev,

they became increasingly absorbed in the specific national and social

problems of Russia and, in particular, in the problem of the peasanthis ignorance, his misery, the forms of his social life, their historical origins, their economic future. The liberals of the 40s may have been

stirred to genuine compassion or indignation by the plight of the

peasantry: the institution of serfdom had long been an acute public

problem and indeed a great and recognised evil. Yet, excited as they

were by the latest social and philosophical ideas which reached them

from the west, they felt no inclination to spend their time upon

detailed and tedious researches into the actual condition of the

peasantry, upon the multitude of unexplored social and economic data

which had been so superficially described by Custine, or later in

1 A. I. Koshelev, Zopisli (Berlin, 1 884), pp. 81-4.

19

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

greater detail by Haxthausen. Turgenev had done something to

awaken interest in the day-to-day hyt1 of the peasants by the realism

of his Sportsman's Sketches. Grigorovich had moved both Belinsky

and Dostoevsky by his tragic but, to a later taste, lifeless and overwrought descriptions of peasants in The Yillage, and in Anton Goremyka, published in I 84 7. But these were ripples on the surf.lce. During the

period of enforced insulation �fter I 849, with Europe in the arms of

reaction, and only Herren's plaintive voice faintly audible from afar,

those socially conscious Russian intellectuals who had survived the

turmoil directed their sharp and fearless analytical apparatus upon the

actual conditions in which the vast majority of their countrymen were

living. Russia, which a decade or two earlier was in considerable

danger of becoming a permanent intellectual dependency of Berlin

or of Paris, was forced by this insulation to develop a native social and

political outlook of her own. A sharp change in tone is now noticeable;

the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 6os and 70s

is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions,

and the consequent emergence of a new class and a new tone in

Russia as in Europe, but in at least equal measure to the prison walls

within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects.

This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the nonpolitical interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. The gulf between the

right and the left-between the disciples of Dostoevsky and Katkov

and the followers of Chernyshevsky or Bakunin-all typical radical

intellectuals in I 848 -had grown very wide and deep. In due course

there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries,

conscious-all too conscious-of the specifically Russian character of

their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. They were

forced away froo the general current of European development (with

which, in any case, their history seemed to have so little in common)

by the bankruptcy in Europe of the libertarian movement of I 848 :

they drew strength from the very harshness of the discipline which

the failure in the west had indirectly imposed upon them. Henceforth

the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly

unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence;

and they adopted this truth and abandoned sentimental liberalism

without being forced to pay for their liberation with that bitter,

1 Approximately, 'way of life'.

2.0

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

personal disillusionment and acute frustration which proved too much

for a good many idealistic radials in the west. The Russian radials

learnt this lesson by means of precept and example, indirectly as it

were, without the destruction of their inner resources. The experience

obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a

decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later

revolutionary movement in Russia.

21

The Hedgehog and the Fox

A queer combination of the brain of an Englilh chelllist

with the eoul of an Indian Buddhist.

E. M. de Vogili

T H a R I! is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus

which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows

one big thing. '1 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation

of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for

all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken

figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they

mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers,

and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great

chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single

central vision, one system less or more coherent or -articulate, in

terms of which they ·understand, think and feel-a single, universal,

organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say

has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends,

often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in

some dt facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause,

related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform

acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal,

their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing

upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what

they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking

to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, allembracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and

artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes;

and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too

much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the

first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal,

Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees,

t 'IT0M• orB' O>tc!nnje, aM' EXWOS b1 ,.,.E-ya. Archilochus frag. :zor in

M. L. West (ed.), l11m6i tt Eltgi Gr��tci, vol. 1 {Oxford, 197 1).

22

THE H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere,

Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the

dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately

absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it

be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions

which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from

which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.

Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between

Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky's celebrated speech about

Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been

considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of

Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it

perversely represents Pushkin-an arch-fox, the, greatest in the nineteenth century- as a being similar to Dostoevsky who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into

a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was

indeed the centre of Dostoevsky's own universe, but exceedingly

remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin's protean genius.

Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned

by these gigantic figures-at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky;

and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who

find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree

be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogo),

Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and

to Dostoevsky leads-or, at any rate, has led - to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him -ask whether he belongs to the first category or the

second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of

one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded

of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer.

The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems

to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information

that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his

views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost, than any

other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any

normal sense: his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous

with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued

about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more

articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any

23

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

other writer. I s h e a fox o r a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is

the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare

or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike

either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd?

What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?

I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question,

since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the

art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to

suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact

that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his

best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that

Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his

gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently

his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what

he and others were doing or should be doing. No one can complain

that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about

this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings

-diaries, recorded ohiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories,

social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and

public correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and

what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history

to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are

devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines,

and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and

some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take

Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his

readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the

light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all

mankind.

I I

Tolstoy's philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained the

attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically interesting view

or as an occurrence i n the history of ideas, or even as an element in the

development of Tolstoy himself.! Those who have treated Tolstoy

1 For the purpose of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely

to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Ptau, and to

ignore, for e:umple, St6astopol Storits, Th Couacls, the fragments of the

T H E H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

primarily as a novelist have at times looked upon the historical and

philosophical passages scattered through War and P�ace as so much

perverse interruption of the narrative, as a regrettable liability to

irrelevant digression characteristic of thiS' great, but excessively

opinionated, writer, a lop-sided, home-made metaphysic of small or

no intrinsic interest, deeply inartistic and thoroughly foreign to the

purpose and structure of the work of art as a whole. Turgenev, who

found Tolstoy's personality and an: antipathetic, although in later

years he freely and generously acknowledged his genius as a writer,

led the attack. In letters to Pavel Annenkov1 Turgenev speaks of

Tolstoy's 'charlatanism', of his historical disquisitions as 'farcical', as

'trickery' which takes in the unwary, injected by an 'autodidact' into

his work as an inadequate substitute for genuine knowledge. He

hastens to add that Tolstoy does, of course, make up for this by his

marvellous artistic genius; and then accuses him of inventing 'a system

which seems to solve everything very simply; as, for example, historical

fatalism: he mounts his hobby-horse and is off! only when he touches

earth does he, like Antaeus, recover his true strength'.t And the same

note is sounded in the celebrated and touching invocation sent by

Turgenev from his death-bed to his old friend and enemy, begging him

to cast away his prophet's mantle and return to his true vocation-that

of 'the great writer of the Russian land'. 3 Flaubert, despite his 'shouts

of admiration' over passages of Wtir and P�ace, is equally horrified : 'il

se repete et il philosophise,'f. he writes in a letter to Turgenev who had

sent him the French version of the masterpiece then almost unknown

outside Russia. In the same strain Belinsky's intimate friend and

correspondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin, who

was well disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fet: 'Literary

specialists . . . find that the intellectual element of the novel is very

weak, the philosophy of history is trivial and superficial, the denial of

the decisive influence of individual personalities on events is nothing

unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy's own scattered reflections

on this subject except in so far as they bear on vieWll expressed in War at�tl

P�ac�.

1 See E. I. Bogoslovsky, Turg�11tr1 DL. TDisiDifl (Tiflis, I 894), p. +I; quoted

by P. I. Biryukov, L. N. TDistoy (Berlin, 19zr), vol. :z, pp. 48-9.

I ibid.

1 Letter to Tolstoy of I I July 1 883.

' Gustave Flaubert, Lnms i"'Jit�s J T()llrgul•�ff (Monaco, I9+6), p. :z 18.

25

R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S

but a lot o f mystical subtlety, but apart from this the artistic gift of the

author is beyond dispute-yesterday I gave a dinner and Tyutchev was

here, and I am repeating what everybody said. '1 Contemporary

historians and military specialists, at least one of whom had himself

fought in 1 81 2,1 indignantly complained of inaccuracies of fact; and

since then damning evidence has been adduced of falsification of

historical detail by the author of War and Ptact,3 done apparently

with deliberate intent, in full knowledge of the available original

sources and in the known absence of any counter-evidence-falsification perpetrated, it seems, in the interests not so much of an artistic as of an 'ideological' purpose. This consensus of historical and aesthetic

criticism seems to have set the tone for nearly all later appraisals of

the 'ideological' content of War and Peace. Shelgunov at least honoured

it with a direct attack for its social quietism, which he called the 'philosophy of the swamp'; others for the most part either politely ignored it, or treated it as a characteristic aberration which they put down to

a combination of the well-known Russian tendency to preach (and

thereby ruin works of art) with the half-baked infatuation with

general ideas characteristic of young intellectuals in countries remote

from centres of civilisation. 'It is fortunate for us that the author is a

better artist than thinker' said the critic Dmitri Akhsharumov,• and

for more than three-quarters of a century this sentiment has been

echoed by most of the critics of Tolstoy, both Russian and foreign,

both pre-revolutionary and Soviet, both 'reactionary' and 'progressive',

by most of those who look on him primarily as a writer and an artist,

and of those to whom he is a prophet and a teacher, or a martyr, or a

social inRuence, or a sociological or psychological 'case'. Tolstoy's

theory of history is of equally little interest to Vogue and Merezhkovsky, to Stefan Zweig a'nd Percy Lubbock, to Biryukov and 1 A. A. Fet, Moi fJOipominaniya (Moscow, 1 890), part 2, p. 175.

I Se e the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military

historian, in his I8I2 god fl 'Yoint i mirt' (St Petersburg, 1 869), and the

tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S.

Norov, A. P. Pyatkovsky and S. Navalikhin. The lint served in the campaign

of 1 8 1 2 and, despite some errors of fact, makes criticisms of substance. The

last two are, as literary critics, almost worthless, but they seem to have taken

the trouble to veriljr some of the relevant facts.

a See V. B. Shklovsky, Mattr'yal i Jtil' fl romant L'fla Toiitogo 'Yoina i mir'

(Moscow, 1928), pa11im, but particularly chapter 7· See below, p. 42.

• Raz6or 'Yoiny i mira' (St Petersburg, 1 868), pp. 1 -4.

26

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

E. J. Simmons, not to speak of lesser men. Historians of Russian

thought1 tend to label this aspect of Tolstoy as 'fatalism', and move

on to the more interesting historical theories of Leontiev or Danilevsky. Critics endowed with more caution or humility do not go as far as this, but treat the 'philosophy' with nervous respect; even

Derrick Leon, who treats Tolstoy's views of this period with greater

care than the majority of his biographers, after giving a painstaking

account of Tolstoy's reflections on the forces which dominate history,

particularly of the second section of the long epilogue which follows

the end of the narrative portion of War and Ptoct, proceeds to follow

Aylmer Maude in making no attempt either to assess the theory

or to relate it to the rest of Tolstoy's life or thought; and even

so much as this is almost unique.1 Those, again, who are mainly

interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacher concentrate on the

later doctrines of the master, held after his conversion, when he had

ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer ·and had established

himself as a teacher of mankind, an object of veneration and pilgrimage.

Tolstoy's life is normally represented as falling into two distinct parts:

first comes the author of immortal masterpieces, later the prophet of

personal and social regeneration; first the aristocratic writer, the difficult, somewhat unapproachable, troubled novelist of genius; then the 1 e.g. Professon Ilin, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others.

1 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian

writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French

scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject

I know of only two of any worth. The lint, 'Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo',

by V. N. Pertsev, in 'Voina i mir: sburnik pll11lJati L. N. Tolrtogo, ed. V. P.

Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), after taking Tolstoy mildly

to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into

innocuous generalities. The other, 'Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo,

"Voina i mir" ', by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Rtmltaya mysl' Ouly 191 1),

pp. 78-103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish

nothing at all. (Very dilferent is Arnold Bennett's judgement, of which I

have learnt since writing this: 'The last part of the Epilogue is full of good

ideas the johnny can't work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would

have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldn't leave it out. It

was what he wrote the book for.' Tile Joumals of ../mold Btfllltll, ed.

Newman Flower, 3 vols [London, 1932·3), vol. z, 191 1-192 1, p. 6z.) As

for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy's historical views to those of various

latter-day Marxiats-Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc.-they belong to the curiosities

of politics or theology rather than to those ofliterature.

27

RU SS IAN TH INKERS

sage-dogmatic, perverse, exaggerated, but wielding a vast inRuence,

panicularly in his own country-a world institution of unique importance. From time to time attempts are made to trace his later period to its roots in his earlier phase, which is felt to be full of presentiments of the later life of self-renunciation; it is this later period which is regarded as important; there are philosophical, theological, ethical,

psychological, political, economic studies of the later Tolstoy in all his

aspects.

And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy's interest in history

and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive,

both before and during the writing of War and Ptact. No one who

reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Ptact itself, can

doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as

the hean of the entire matter-the central issue round which the novel

is built. 'Charlatanism', 'superficiality', 'intellectual feebleness' -surely

Tolstoy is the last writer to whom these epithets seem applicable:

bias, perversity, arrogance, perhaps; self-deception, lack of restraint,

possibly; moral or spiritual inadequacy-of this he was better aware.

than his enemies; but failure of intellect-lack of critical power-a

tendency to emptineSs-liability to ride off on some patently absurd,

superficial doctrine to the detriment of realistic description or analysis

of life-infatuation with some fashionable theory which Botkin or Fet

can easily see through, although Tolstoy, alas, cannot-these charges

seem grotesquely unplausible. No man in his senses, during this century

at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy's intellectual power,

his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that

corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky applied

to him the archaic Russian tenn 'netovshchik'1 ('negativist')-an early

version of that nihilism which Vogue and Alben Sorel later quite

naturally attribute to him. Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy's

violently unhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all effons

to explain or justify human action or character in terms of social or

individual growth, or 'roots' in the past; this side by side with an

absorbed and life-long interest in history, leading to artistic and philosophical results which provoked such queerly disparaging comments from ordinarily sane and sympathetic critics-surely there is something

here which deserves attention.

1 SeeM. De-Pule, 'V oina iz-za "Voiny i mira" ', Srmkt-Peterlmrgykie vedumasti,

18�, No 144 (17 May), 1 .

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

III

Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have

arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to

penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen

as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current

explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied,

from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be,

reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root

of every matter, at whatever cost. This remained Tolstoy's attitude

throughout his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of'trickery'

or of 'superficiality'. And with this went an incurable love of the

concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of

the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural- in short an early

tendency to a scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in every situation he looked for 'hard' facts-for what could be grasped and verified by the normal intellect uncorrupted by intricate theories divorced from

tangible realities, or by other-wordly mysteries, theological, poetical,

and metaphysical alike. He was tormented by the ultimate problems

which face young men in every generation-about good and evil, the

origin and purpose of the universe and its inhabitants, the causes of

all that happens; but the answers provided by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd, if only because of the words in which they were formulated-words which bore no apparent reference to

the everyday world of ordinary common sense to which he clung

obstinately, even before he became aware of what he was doing, as

being alone real. History, only history, only the sum of the concrete

events in time and space-the sum of the actual experience of actual

men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual,

three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environmentthis alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers-answers needing for their apprehension no special senses or

faculties which normal human beings did not possess-might be constructed. This, of course, was the spirit of empirical inquiry which animated the great anti-theological and anti-metaphysical thinkers of

the eighteenth century, and Tolstoy's realism and inability to be taken

in by shadows made him their natural disciple before he had learnt of

their doctrines. Like Monsieur Jourdain, he spoke prose long before

he knew it, and remained an enemy of transcendentalism from the

29

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

beginning to the end of his life. H e grew up during the heyday of

the Hegelian philosophy which sought to explain all things in terms

of historical development, but conceived this process as being ultimately

not susceptible to the methods of empirical investigation. The historicism of his time doubdess inAuenced the young Tolstoy as it did all inquiring persons of his time; but the metaphysical content he rejected

instinctively, and in one of his letters he described Hegel's writings

as unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes. History alone

-the sum of empirically discoverable data-held the key to the mystery

of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only

history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical

problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinkP.r in

the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live?

Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical

connections and the demand for empirical answers to these prolclyatyt

'1Joprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries

and letters show very vividly.

In his early diaries we find references to his attempts to compare

Catherine the Great's Nalcaz1 with the passages in Montesquieu on

which she professed to have founded it.8 He reads Hume and Thie�

as well as Rousseau, Sterne, and Dickens.5 He is obsessed by the

thought that philosophical principles can only be understood in their

concrete expression in history.• 'To write the genuine history of

present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life.'7 Or

again : 'The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots',8 with the

implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world.

1 'Accursed questions' -a phrase which became a cliche! in nineteenthcentury Russia for those central moral and social issues of which every honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and then

be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back

upon his fellow-men, conscious of his responsibility for what he was doing.

a Instructions to her legislative experts.

a L. N. Tolstoy, Polrwe sobr(IJiit socbmmii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1918"64), vol.

46, pp. 4-18.

' ibid., PP· 97· I I ], 1 14-o 1 17, 123-+o 1 27.

1 ibid., pp. 1 26, 1 27, 130, 13 2-4-o 167, 1 76, 249; 82, 1 10; 14-o.

• Diary entry for 1 1 June 18§2.

7 Entry for 22 September 1 Bsz.

• N. N. Apoatolov, LIP TolslfiJ su1l s1rai1s11mi islmi (Moscow, 1928),

p. zo.

30

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of

disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians,

makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical

philosophy it pretends to be something it is not-namely, a science

capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain. Since men cannot

solve philosophical questions by the principles of reason they try to

do so historically. But history is 'one of the most backward of sciences

-a science which has lost its proper aim'.1 The reason for this is

that history will not, because it cannot, solve the great questions

which have tormented men in every generation. In the course of

seeking to answer these questions men accumulate a knowledge . of

facts as they succeed each other in time: but this is a mere by-product,

a kind of 'side issue' which-and this is a mistake-is studied as an end

in itself. And again, 'history will never reveal to us what connections

there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality,

between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues. What it will

tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, where they

lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc. • And according to

his friend Nazariev, Tolstoy said to him in the winter of 1 846:

'History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered

up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death

of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg-what is all this but old wives'

tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's

daughter,, occurred on 2.1 August 1 562., whereas.his fourth, to Anna

Alekseevna Koltovskaya, oa:urr� in 1 572.

?'2

• • .

History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession

of unexplained events. 'Everything is forced into a standard mould

invented by the historians: Tsar Ivan the Terrible, on whom Professor

Ivanov is lecturing at the moment, after 1 560 suddenly becomes

transformed from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel

tyrant. How? Why? -You mustn't even ask . . . '1 And half a century

later, in 1 908, he declares to Gusev: 'History would be an excellent

thing if only it were true.'' The proposition that history could (and

should) be made scientific is a commonplace in the nineteenth century;

but the number of those who interpreted the term 'science' as meaning

1 ibid.

• V. N. Nazariev, 'Lyudi bylogo vremeai', L. N. TolsiiJ 11 1101/fJiflifllllliytllA

s�lfltllllilflll (Moscow, I9§ S), vol. r, p. 52.

1 ibid., pp. §2·3·

' N. N. Guaev, D11t1gDU s L. N. TolsiJIII (Moecow', 1973), p. 188.

l•

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

natural science, and then asked themselves whether history could be

transformed into a science in this specific sense, is not great. The most

uncompromising policy was that of Auguste Comte, who, following

his master, Saint-Simon, tried to turn history into sociology, with

what fantastic consequences we need not here relate. Karl Marx was

perhaps, of all thinkers, the man who took his programme most

seriously; and made the bravest, if one of the least successful, attempts

to discover general laws which govern historical evolution, conceived

on the then alluring analogy of biology and anatomy so triumphantly

transformed by Darwin's new evolutionary theories. Like Marx (of

whom at the time of writing War and Peau he apparently knew

nothing) Tolstoy saw clearly that if history was a science, it must be

possible to discover and formulate a set of true laws of history which,

in conjunction with the data of empirical observation, would make

prediction of the future (and 'retrodiction' of the past) as feasible as it

had become, say, in geology or astronomy. But he saw more clearly

than Marx and his followers that this had, in fact, not been achieved,

and said so with his usual dogmatic candour, and reinforced his thesis

with arguments designed to show that the prospect of achieving this

goal was non-existent; and clinched the matter by observing that the

fulfilment of this scientific hope would end human life as we knew it:

'if we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility

of life (i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free

will] is destroyed'.1 But what oppressed Tolstoy was not merely the

'unscientific' nature of history-that no matter how scrupulous the

technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could

be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped

natural sciences-but he further thought that he could not justify to

himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less

arbitrary distribvtion of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed

to be doomed. He complains that while the factors which determine

the life of mankind are very various, historians select from them only

some single aspect, say the political or the ..:conomic, and represent

it as primary, as the efficient cause of social change; but then, what of

religion, what of 'spiritual' factors, and the many other aspects-a

literally countless multiplicity-with which all events are endowed?

How can we escape the conclusion that the histories which exist

represent what Tolstoy declares to be 'perhaps only o·OOI per cent of

1 Wtlr tl11d Pttlct, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1 .

32

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E F O X

the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples'?

History, as it is normally written, usually represents 'political' - public

-events as the most important, while spiritual-'inner'-events are

largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they-the 'inner' events-that

are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings;

they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of;

hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.

Throughout the 5os Tolstoy was obsessed by the desire to write

a historical novel, one of his principal aims being to contrast the 'real'

texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the 'unreal'

picture presented by historians. Again and again in the pages of War

and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'reality' -what 'really'

occurred-with the distorting medium through which it will later be

presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be

recollected by the actors themselves-the original memories having

now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous

because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds. Tolstoy is

perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where

this becomes particularly evident.

Nikolay Rostov at the battle of Austerlitz sees the great soldier,

Prince Bagration, riding up with his suite towards the village of

Schongraben, whence the enemy is advancing; neither he nor his

staff, nor the officers who gallop up to him with messages, nor anyone

else is, or can be, aware of what exactly is happening, nor where, nor

why; nor is the chaos of the battle in any way made dearer either in

fact or in the minds of the Russian officers by the appearance of

Bagration. Nevertheless his arrival puts heart into his subordinates;

his courage, his calm, his mere presence create the illusion of which

he is himself the first victim, namely, that what is happening is somehow connected with his skill, his plans, that it is his authority that is in some way directing the course of the battle; and this, in its turn,

has a marked effect on the general morale all round him. The dispatches

which will duly be written later will inevitably ascribe every act and

event on the Russian side to him and his dispositions; the credit or

discredit, the victory or the defeat, will belong to him, although it is

clear to everyone that he will have had less to do with the conduct

and outcome of the battle than the humble, unknown soldiers who

do at least perform whatever actual fighting is done, i.e. shoot at each

other, wound, kill, advance, retreat, and so on.

Prince Andrey, too, knows this, most dearly at Borodino, where

33

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

h e i s mortally wounded. H e begins to understand the truth earlier,

during the period when he is making efforts to meet the 'important'

persons who seem to be guiding the destinies of Russia; he then

gradually becomes convinced that Alexander's principal adviser, the

famous reformer Speransky, and his friends, and indeed Alexander

himself, are systematically deluding themselves when they suppose

their activities, their words, memoranda, rescripts, resolutions, laws

etc. to be the motive factors which cause historical change and determine the destinies of men and nations; whereas in fact they are nothing: only so much self-important milling ia the void. And so

Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers

or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be

from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose

lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller

the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all

their theoretical authority, upon that history. In a famous passage

dealing with the state of Moscow in 1 8 1 2 Tolstoy observes that from

the heroic achievements of Russia after the burning of Moscow one

might infer that its inhabitants were absorbed entirely in acts of selfsacrifice-in saving their country, or in lamenting its destruction-in heroism, martyrdom, despair etc., but that in fact this was not so.

People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about

their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking

that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the

most useful to their country and community, while those who tried

to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in

history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or

heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless.1

Worst of all, in Tolstoy's eyes, were those unceasing talkers who

accused one another of the kind of thing 'for which no one could in

fact have been responsible'. And this because 'nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the courSe of history. Only unconscious activity bears

fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never

understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he

is struck with sterility.'1 To try to 'understand' anything by rational

means is to make sure of failure. Pierre Bezukhov wanders about,

1 W11r 1111J Pt11u, vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4·

I ibid.

34

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

'lost' on the battlefield of Borodino, and looks for something which

he imagines as a kind of set piece; a battle as depicted by the historians

or the painters. But he finds only the ordinary confusion of individual

human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want.l

That, at any rate, is concrete, uncontaminated by theories and abstractions; and Pierre is therefore closer to the truth about the course of events-at least as seen by men-than those who believe them to obey

a discoverable set of laws or rules. Pierre sees only a succession of

'accidents' whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable; only loosely strung groups of events forming

· an ever varying pattern, following no discernible order. Any claim

to perceive patterns susceptible to 'scientific' formulas must be

mendacious.

Tolstoy's bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for

those who pose as official specialists in managing human affairs, in

this case the western military theorists, a General Pfuel, or Generals

Bennigsen and Paulucci, who are all shown talking equal nonsense

at the Council of Orissa, whether they defend a given strategic or

tactical theory or oppose it; these men must be impostors since no

theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human

behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and

effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history

purports to record. Those who affect to be able to contract this infinite

multiplicity within their 'scientific' laws must be either deliberate

charlatans, or blind leaders of the blind. The harshest judgment is

accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon,

who acts upon, and has hypnotised others into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition, or by otherwise succeeding in answering

correctly the problems posed by history. The greater the claim the

greater the lie : Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most

contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy.

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to

expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces

-these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent,

1 On the connection of this with Stendhal'a lA CAtlrlrttllt u Ptmnt see

p. 56, note 1.

35

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

talking, writing, desperately and aimlessly i n order to keep u p appearances and avoid facing the bleak truths-side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence

and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life

which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily

existence. When Tolstoy contrasts this real life-the actual, everyday,

'live' experience of individuals-with the panoramic view conjured

up by historians, it is dear to him which is real, and which is a coherent,

sometimes elegantly contrived, but always fictitious construction.

Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is,

perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which

Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets

of her own generation- Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett-blind

materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly

consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects

which lie outside the individual soul-the so-called social, economic,

political realities-for that which alone is genuine, the individual

experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the

colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and movements, the jealousies, loves,

hatreds, passions, the rare Rashes of insight, the transforming moments,

the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute

all there is-which are reality.

What, then, is the historian's task-to describe the ultimate data of

subjective experience-the persona! lives lived by men-the 'thoughts,

knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions' of which,

for Tolstoy, 'real' life is compounded, and only that? That was the

task to which Turgenev was perpetually calling Tolstoy-him and all

writers, but him in particular, because therein lay his true genius, his

destiny as a great Russian writer; and this he rejected with violent

indignation even during his middle years, before the final religious

phase. For this was not to give the answer to the question of what

there is, and why and how it comes to be and passes away, but to turn

one's back upon it altogether, and stifte one's desire to discover how

men live in society, and how they are affected by one another and by

their environment, arod to what end. This kind of artistic purismpreached in his day by Flaubert-this kind of preoccupation witl1 the analysis and description of the experience and the relationships and

problems and inner lives of individuals (later advocated and practised

by Gide and the writers he inftuenced, both in France and in England)

struck him as both trivial and hlse. He had no doubt about his own

36

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

superlative skill in this very art-and that it was precisely this for

which he was admired; and he condemned it absolutely. In a letter

written while he was working on War and Peace he said with bittern� that he had no doubt that what the public would like best would be his scenes of social and personal life, his ladies and his gentlemen,

with their petty intrigues and entertaining conversations and marvellously described small idiosyncrasies.• But these are the trivial 'flowers'

of life, not the 'roots'. Tolstoy's purpose is the discovery of the truth,

and therefore he must know what history consists of, and recreate

only that. History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which

pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been

discovered, and the concepts in current use-'cause', 'accident', 'genius'

-explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. Why

do the events the totality of which we call history occur as they do?

Some historians attribute events to the acts of individuals, but this is

no answer: for they do not explain how these acts 'cause' the events

they are alleged to 'cause' or 'originate'. There is a passage of savage

irony intended by Tolstoy to parody the average school histories of his

time, sufficiently typical to be worth reproducing in full:1

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such

and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed

France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and

also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites

and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were

at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century

there gathered in Paris two dcrzen or so persons who started saying

that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of

France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These

people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there

was a man of genius in France-Napoleon. He conquered everyone

everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great

genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed

1 Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated-and militantly moralisticintroduction to an edition of Maupassant whose genius, despite everything, he admires ('Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana', Po/not

sol!rt�t�it soclline11ii [ cf. p. 30, note 3 above], vol. 30, pp. 3-24). He thinks

much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and

platitudinous (diary entry for 3 I january I 908, ibid., voJ. 56, pp. 97-8).

• War a11ti Peace, epilogue, part z, chapter r .

37

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

them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived

in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did.

Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of

people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a

great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander who

decided to re-establish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars

with Napoleon. But in the year '07 he suddenly made friends with

him, and in the year ' 1 1 quarrelled with him again, and they both

again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six

hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then

he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor

Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe

to raise an army against the disturber of her pe;1ce. All Napoleon's

allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against

Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered

Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne,

and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him

of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the

fact that five years before and a year after, everyone considered him

a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who

until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen

and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears

before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile.

Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who

had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy.

Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They

were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other;

but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion,

and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him.

But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again

went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was

defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been

discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his

dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and

bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction

occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly

once again.

Tolstoy continues:

1 Empire chain of a certain shape are to this day called 'Talleyrand armchain' in Russia.

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

. . . the new history is like a deaf man replying to questions which

nobody puts to him . . . the primary question . . . is, what power is

it that moves the destinies of peoples? . . . History seems to presuppose that this power can be taken for granted, and is familiar to everyone, but, in spite of every wish to admit that this power is

familiar to us, anyone who has read a great many historical works

cannot help doubting whether this power, which different historians

understand in different ways, is in fact so completely familiar to

everyone.

He goes on to say that political historians who write in this way

explain nothing; they merely attribute events to the 'power' which

important individuals are said to exercise on others, but do not tell us

what the term 'power' means: and yet this is the heart of the problem.

The problem of historical movement is directly connected with the

'power' exercised by some men over others: but what is 'power'?

How does one acquire it? Can it be transferred by one man to another?

Surely it is not merely physical strength that is meant? Nor moral

strength? Did Napoleon possess either of these?

General, as opposed to national, historians seem to Tolstoy merely to

extend this category without elucidating it: instead of one country or

nation, many are introduced, but the spectacle of the interplay of

mysterious 'forces' makes it no clearer why some men or nations

obey others, why wars are made, victories won, why innocent men

who believe that murder is wicked kill one another with enthusiasm

and pride, and are glorified for so doing; why great movements of

human masses occur, sometimes from east to west, sometimes the

other way. Tolstoy is particularly irritated by references to the

dominant influence of great men or of ideas. Great men, we are told,

are typical of the movements of their age: hence study of their

characters 'explains' such movements. Do the characters of Diderot

or Beaumarchais 'explain' the advance of the west upon the east? Do

the letters of Ivan the Terrible to Prince Kurbsky 'explain' Russian

expansion westward? But historians of culture do no better, for they

merely add as an extra factor something called the 'force' of ideas or

of books, although we still have no notion of what is meant by words

like 'force'. But why should Napoleon, or Mme de Stael or Baron

Stein or Tsar Alexander, or all of these, plus the Contrat social,

'cause' Frenchmen to behead or to drown each other? Why is this

called an 'explanation'? As for the importance which historians of

culture attach to ideas, doubtless all men are liable to exaggerate the

39

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

importance o f their own wares: ideas are the commodity i n which

intellectuals deal - to a cobbler there's nothing like leather-the professors merely tend to magnify their personal activities into the central

'force' that rules the world. Tolstoy adds that an even deeper darkness

is cast upon this subject by political theorists, moralists, metaphysicians.

The celebrated notion of the social contract, for example, which

some liberals peddle, speaks of the 'vesting' of the wills, i.e. the power,

of many men in one individual or group of individuals; but what kind

of act is this 'vesting'? It may have a legal or ethical significance, it may

be relevant to what should be considered as permitted or forbidden, to

the world of rights and duties, or of the good and the bad, but as a

factual explanation of how a sovereign accumulates enough 'power'as if it were a commodity-which enables him to effect this or that result, it means nothing. It declares that the conferring of power

makes powerful; but this tautology is too unilluminating. What is

'power' and what is 'conferring'? And who confers it and how is

such conferring done?1 The process seems very different from whatever it is that is discussed by the physical sciences. Conferring is an act, but an unintelligible one; conferring power, acquiring it, using it,

is not at all like eating or drinking or thinking or walking. We remain

in the dark: obscurum per obscurius.

After demolishing the jurists and moralists and political philosophers-among them his beloved Rousseau-Tolstoy applies himself to demolishing the liberal theory of history according to which

everything may turn upon what may seem an insignificant accident.

Hence the pages in which he obstinately tries to prove that Napoleon

knew as little of what actually went on during the battle of Borodino

as the lowliest of his soldiers; and that therefore his cold on the eve

of it, of which so much was made by the historians, could have made

no appreciable difference. With great force he argues that only those

orders or decisions issued by the commanders now seem particularly

crucial (and are concentrated upon by historians), which happened

to coincide with what later actually occurred; whereas a great many

1 OneofTolstoy's Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to on p. 27,

note z, says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain

which is the business of other sciences; and that 'power' happens to be the

unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy's point is that no other

science can 'explain' it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term,

not a concept but nothing at all- t:7ox 11inili.

40

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

other exactly similar, perfectly good orders and decisions, which

seemed no less crucial and vital to those who were issuing them at

the time, are forgotten because, having been foiled by unfavourable

turns of events, they were not, because they could not be, carried out,

and for this reason now seem historically unimportant. After disposing

of the heroic theory of history, Tolstoy turns with even greater

savagery upon scientific sociology, which claims to have discovered

laws of history, but cannot possibly have found any, because the

number of causes upon which events turn is too great for human

knowledge or calculation. We know too few facts, and we select them

at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. No

doubt if we were omniscient we might be able, like Laplace's ideal

observer, to plot the course of every drop of which the stream of

history consists, but we are, of course, pathetically ignorant, and the

areas of our knowledge are incredibly small compared to what is

uncharted and (Tolstoy vehemently insists on this) unchartable.

Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but,

as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it

derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know

about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act

is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the

more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we

live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if

something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable:

to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The

more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor

seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we

are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall

never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.

Tolstoy's central thesis-in some respects not unlike the theory of

the inevitable 'self-deception' of the bourgeoisie held by his contemporary Karl Marx, save that what Marx reserves for a class, Tolstoy sees in almost all mankind-is that there is a natural law

whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are

determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek

to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for

what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or

heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men�

4 1

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough

to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would

rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified

in their name, than recognise their own insignificance and impotence

in the cosmic .Row which pursues its course irrespective of their wills

and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which

Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described,

side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons

blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily .give

to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of

illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns

upon those who have the humility to recognise their own unimportance

and irrelevance. And this is the purpose, too, of those philosophical

passages where, in language more ferocious than Spinoza's, but with

intentions similar to his, the errors of the pseudo-sciences are exposed.

There is a particularly vivid simile1 in which the great man is likened

to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter, Because the

ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-wether for the rest

of the .Rock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the .Rock,

and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his

will. He thinks this and the .Rock may think it too. Nevertheless

the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play,

but slaughter-a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he

nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such

a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great

men of history. Indeed, as an acute literary historian has pointed out,1

Tolstoy sometimes seems almost deliberately to ignore the historical

evidence and more than once consciously distorts the facts in order

to bolster up his favourite thesis. The character of Kutuzov is a case

in point. Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least

imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with

all the attributes he admired-humility, freedom from bureaucratic

or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov

was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps

by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble voluptuary,

1 W11r 11trJ Pt11u, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2.

1 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (p. 26, note 3 above), chapten 7-9, and alJo

K. V. Polaovsky, 'lstochnilci romana "Voina i mir"', in Obninsky and Polner,

op. cit. (p. 27, note 2 above).

T H E H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of

War and P�ac� which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage-one

of the most moving in literature-in which Tolstoy describes the

moment when the old man is woken in his camp at FiJi to be told

that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us,

and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere

for which the evidence is flimsy. but which is artistically indispensable

to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of the truth. In War and P�ac� Tolstoy

treats &cts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all

obsessed by his thesis-the contrast between the universal and allimportarit but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other, the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed,

experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical

grounds. This corresponds in its turn to a tormenting inner conflict,

one of many, in Tolstoy himself, between the two systems of value,

the public and the private. On the one hand, if those feelings and

immediate experiences. upon which the ordinary values of private

individuals and historians alike ultimately rest are nothing but a vast

illusion, this must, in the name of the truth, be ruthlessly demonstrated,

and the values and the explanations which derive from the illusion

exposed and discredited. And in a sense. Tolstoy does try to do this,

particularly when he is philosophising, as in the great public scenes

of the novel itself, the battle pieces, the descriptions of the movements

of peoples, the metaphysical disquisitions. But, on the other hand, he

also does the exact opposite of this when he contrasts with this panorama of public life the .superior value of personal experience, the

'thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions'

of which real life is compounded -when he contrasts the concrete

and multi-coloured reality of individual lives with the pale abstractions

of scientists or historians, particularly the latter, 'from Gibbon to

Buckle', whom he denounces so harshly for mistaking their own

empty categories for real facts. And yet the primacy of these private

experiences and relationships and virtues presupposes that vision of

life, with its sense of personal responsibility, and belief in freedom

and the possibility of spontaneous action, to which the best pages of

43

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

W or and Peact are devoted, and which i s the very illusion to be

exorcised, if the truth is to be faced.

This terrible dilemma is never finally resolved. Sometimes, as in

the explanation of his intentions which he published before the final

part of War and Peact had appeared,1 Tolstoy vacillates; the individual

is 'in some sense' free when he alone is involved: thus, in raising his

arm, he is free within physical limits. But once he is involved in

relationships with others, he is no longer free, he is part of the inexorable stream. Freedom is real, but it is confined to trivial acts. At other times even this feeble ray of hope is extinguished : Tolstoy

declares that he cannot admit even small exceptions to the universal

law; causal determinism is either wholly pervasive or it is nothing,

and chaos reigns. Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but

they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science

cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is

no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are

but names for ignorance of the causal chains, but the chains exist

whether we feel them or not; fortunately we do not; for if we felt

their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would

paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance.

But all is well : for we never shall discover all the causal chains that

operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes

themselves infinitely small ; historians select an absurdly small portion

of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny

section. How would an ideal historical science operate? By using a kind

of calculus whereby this 'differential', the infinitesimals-the infinitely

small human and non-human actions and events-would be integrated,

and in this way the continuum of history would no longer be distorted

by being broken up into arbitrary segments.2 Tolstoy expresses this

notion of calculation by infinitesimals with great lucidity, and with his

habitual simple, vivid, precise use of words. Henri Bergson, who made

his name with his theory of reality as a flux fragmented artificially by

the natural sciences, and thereby distorted and robbed of continuity

and life, developed a very similar point at infinitely greater length, less

clearly, less plausibly, and with an unnecessary parade of terminology.

It is not a mystical '>r an intuitionist view of life. Our ignorance of

1 'Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi: "Voina i mir" ', Rrmltii arltnifl 6 (I 868),

columns 5 I 5-28.

1 War and Ptau, vol. 3• part 3, chapter I .

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

how things happen is not due to some inherent inaccessibility of the

first causes, only to their multiplicity, the smallness of the ultimate

units, and our own inability to see and hear and remember and record

and coordinate enough of the available material. Omniscience is in

principle possible even to empirical beings, but, of course, in practice

unattainable. This alone, and nothing deeper or more interesting, is

the source of human megalomania, of all our absurd delusions. Since

we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction

that we are, what are we to do? Tolstoy arrives at no clear conclusion,

only at the view, in some respect like Burke's, that it is better to

realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it

- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories,

not blinded by the dust raised by the scientific authorities, do, in fact,

understand life-than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs,

which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience,

in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly

inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion. That is his case

against all forms of optimistic rationalism, the natural sciences, liberal

theories of progress, German military expertise, French sociology,

confident social engineering of all kinds. And this is his reason for

inventing a Kutuzov who followed his simple, Russian, untutored

instinct, and despised or ignored the German, French and Italian

experts; and for raising him to the status of a national hero which he

has, partly as a result of Tolstoy's portrait, retained ever since.

'His figures', said Akhsharumov in 1 868, immediately on the

appearance of the last part of War and Ptact, 'are real and not mere

pawns in the hands of an unintelligible destiny';1 the author's theory,

on the other hand, was ingenious but irrelevant. This remained the

general view of Russian and, for the most part, foreign literary critics

too. The Russian left-wing intellectuals attacked Tolstoy for 'social

indifferentism', for disparagement of all noble social impulses as a

compound of ignorance and foolish monomania, and an 'aristocratic'

cynicism about life as a marsh which cannot be reclaimed; Flaubert

and Turgenev, as we have seen, thought the tendency to philosophise

unfortunate in itself; the only critic who took the doctrine seriously

and tried to provide a rational refutation was the historian Kareev.1

1 op. cit. (p. 26, note 4 above).

1 N. I. Kareev, 'Istoricheskaya filosofiya v "Voine i mire" ', YtstTiiA: tflrrJPJ,

July t 887, pp. 227-69.

45

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

Patiently and mildly he pointed out that fascinating as the contrast

between the reality of personal life and the life of the social ant-hill

may be, Tolstoy's conclusions did not follow. True, man is at once

an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time

the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant

element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such

elements. War and Ptau, Kareev tells us, 'is a historical poem on

the philosophical theme of the duality of human life'- and

Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to

happen by the combination of such obscure entitles as the 'power' or

'mental activity' assumed by naive historians; indeed he was, in

Kareev's view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as 'heroes', 'historic forces', 'moral forces',

'nationalism', 'reason' and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or

class, or metaphysical bias. So far so good, and Tolstoy is judged to

have shown deeper insight-'greater realism'-than most historians. He

was right also in demanding that the infinitesimals of history be

integrated. But then he himself had done just that by creating the

individuals of his novel who are not trivial precisely to the degree to

which in their characters and actions, they 'summate' countless others,

who between them do 'move history'. This is the integrating of

infinitesimals, not, of course, by scientific, but by 'artistic-psychological' means. Tolstoy was right to abhor abstractions, but this had led him too far, so that he ended by denying not merely that history

was a natural science like chemistry-which was correct-but that it

was a science at all, an activity with its own proper concepts and

generalisations; which, if true, would abolish all history as such.

Tolstoy was right to say that the impersonal 'forces' and 'purposes'

of the older historians were myths, and dangerously misleading myths,

but unless we were allowed to ask what made this or that group of

individuals-who, in the end, of course, alone were real-behave thus

and thus, without needing first to provide separate psychological

analyses of each member of the group and then to 'integrate' them all,

we could not think about history or society at all. Yet we did do this,

and profitably, and to deny that we could discover a good deal by social

observation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,

tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishing between

46

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

historical truth and falsehood which were less or more reliable-and

that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. Kareev declares

that it is men, doubtless, who make social forms, but these forms-the

ways in which men live-in their turn affect those born into them ;

individual wills may not be all-powerful, but neither are they totally

impotent, and some are more effective than others: Napoleon may

not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a

process which would have occurred unaltered without him; the

'important people' are less important than they themselves or the

more foolish historians may suppose, but neither are they shadows;

individuals, besides their intimate inner lives which alone seem real

to Tolstoy, have social purposes, and some among them have strong

wills too, and these sometimes transform the lives of communities.

Tolstoy's notion of inexorable laws which work themselves out whatever men may think or wish is itself an oppressive myth ; laws are only statistical probabilities, at any rate in the social sciences, not hideous

and inexorable 'forces' -a concept the darkness of which, Kareev

points out, Tolstoy himself in other contexts exposed with such

brilliance and malice, when his opponent seemed to him too naive or

too clever or in the grip of some grotesque metaphysic. But to say

that unless men make history they are themselves, particularly the

'great' among them, mere 'labels', because history makes itself, and

only the unconscious life of the social hive, the human ant-hill, has

genuine significance or value and 'reality'- what is this but a wholly

unhistorical and dogmatic ethical sceptil;ism? Why should we accept

it when empirical evidence points elsewhere?

Kareev's objections are very reasonable, the most sensible and

clearly formulated of all that ever were urged against Tolstoy's view

of history. But in a sense he missed the point. Tolstoy was not primarily

engaged in exposing the fallacies of histories based or. this or that

metaphysical schematism, or those which sought to explain too much

in terms of some one chosen element particularly dear to the author

(all of which Kareev approves), or in refuting the possibility of an

empirical science of sociology (which Kareev thinks unreasonable of

him) in order to set up some rival theory of his own. Tolstoy's concern

with history derives from a deeper source than abstract interest in

historical method or philosophical objections to given types of historical

practice. It seems to spring from something more personal, a bitter

inner conflict between his actual experience and his beliefs, between

his vision of life, and his theory of what it, and he himself, ought to

47

R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S

be , if the vision was to be bearable at all; between the immediate

data which he was too honest and too intelligent to ignore, and the

need for an interpretation of them which did not lead to the childish

absurdities of all previous views. For the one conviction to which his

temperament and his intellect kept him faithful all his life was that all

previous attempts at a rational theodicy-to explain how and why what

occurred occurred as and when it did, and why it was bad or good that

it should or should not do so- all such efforts were grotesque absurdities,

shoddy deceptions which one sharp, honest word was sufficient to blow

away. The Russian critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who has written the

best critical work on Tolstoy in any language,1 in the course of it

develops the thesis that what oppressed Tolstoy most was his lack of

positive convictions: and that the famous passage in Anna Karmina

in which Levin's brother tells him that he- Levin- had no positive

beliefs, that even communism, with its artificial, 'geometrical', symmetry, is better than total scepticism of his- Levin's- kind, in fact refers to Lev Nikolaevich himself, and to the attacks on him by his

brother Nikolay Nikolaevich. Whether or not the passage is literally

autobiographical-and there is little in Tolstoy's writing that, in one

way or another, is not-Eikhenbaum's theory seems, in general, valid.

Tolstoy was by nature not a visionary; he saw the manifold objects

and situations on earth in their full multiplicity; he grasped their

individual essences, and what divided them from what they were not,

with a clarity to which there is uo parallel. Any comforting theory

which attempted to collect, relate, 'synthesise', reveal hidden subst.rata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things-the

fact that they were 'ultimately' parts one of another with no loose

ends-the ideal of the seamless whole-all such doctrines he exploded

contemptuously and without difficulty. His. genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all

others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle;

that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single

purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive

bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world. 1 Li�e all

1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Uv Tokwy (Leningrad, 1918-6o), vol. 1, pp. 11 3-4.

1 Here the parado:r: appeara once more; for the 'inlinitesimals', whose

... s

THE H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

very penetrating, very imaginative, very dear-sighted analysts who

dissect or pulverise in order to reach the indestructible core, and justify

their own annihilating activities (from which they cannot abstain in

any case) by the belief that such a core exists, he continued to kill

his rivals' rickety constructions with cold contempt, as being unworthy

of intelligent men, always hoping that the desperately-sought-for

'real' unity would presently emerge from the destruction of the shams

and frauds- the knock-kneed army of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury philosophies of history. And the more obsessive the suspicion that perhaps the quest was vain, that no core and no unifying principle

would ever be discovered, the more ferocious the measures to drive

this thought away by increasingly merciless and ingenious executions

of more and more false claimants to the title of the truth. As Tolstoy

moved away from literature to polemical writing this tendency

became increasingly prominent: the irritated awareness at the back

of his mind that no final solution was ever, in principle, to be found.

caused Tolstoy to attack the bogus solutions all the more savagely

for the false comfort they offered-and_ for being an insult to the

intelligence.1 Tolstoy's purely intellectual genius for this kind of

lethal activity was very great and exceptional, and all his life he looked

for some edifice strong enough to resist his engines of destruction

and his mines and battering rams; he wished to be stopped by an

immovable obstacle. he wished his violent projectiles to be resisted

by impregnable fortifications. The eminent reasonableness and tentative methods of Professor Kareev. his mild academic remonstrance.

were altogether too unlike the final impenetrable. irreducible, solid

bed-rock of truth on which alone that secure interpretation of life

could be built which all his life he wished to find.

The thin. 'positive' doctrine of historical change in War and Ptact

is all that remains of this despairing search. and it is the immense

superiority of Tolstoy's offensive over his defensive weapons that

integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to

make this operation possible; yet the sense of 'reality' consists in the sense of

their unique dilferences.

1 In our day French existentialists for similar psychological reasons have

struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to

still serious questions, shortlived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable

but must be borne, above all not denied or 'explained'; for all explaining is

explaining away, and that is a denial of the given-the existent-the brute facts.

49

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

has always made his philosophy of history-the theory of the minute

particles, requiring integration-seem so threadbare and anificial to

the average, reasonably critical, moderately sensitive reader of the

novel. Hence the tendency of most of those who have written about

War and Peace, both immediately on its appearance and in later years,

to maintain Akhsharumov's thesis 'that Tolstoy's genius lay in his

quality as a writer, a creator of a world more real than life itself; while

the theoretical disquisitions, even though Tolstoy himself may have

looked upon them as the most important ingredient in the book, in

fact threw no light either upon the character or the value of the work

itself, nor on the creative process by which it was achieved. This

anticipated the approach of those psychological critics who maintain

that the author himself often scarcely knows the sources of his own

activity: that the springs of his genius are invisible to him, the process

itselflargely unconscious, and his own oven purpose a mere rationalisation in his own mind of the true, but scarcely conscious, motives and methods involved in the act of creation, and consequently often a mere

hindrance to those dispassionate students of an and literature who are

engaged upon the 'scientific' -i.e. naturalistic-analysis of its origins

and evolution. Whatever we may think of the general validity of such

an outlook, it is something of a historical irony that Tolstoy should

have been treated in this fashion; for it is virtually his own way with

the academic historians at whom he mocks with such Voltairian irony.

And yet there is much poetic justice in it: for the unequal ratio of

critical to constructive elements in his own philosophising seems due

to the fact that his sense of reality (a reality which resides in individual

persons and their relationships alone) served to explode all the large

theories which ignored its findings, but proved insufficient by itself

to provide the basis of a more satisfactory general account of the facts.

And there is no evidence that Tolstoy himself ever conceived it possible

that this was the root of the 'duality', the failure to reconcile the two lives

lived by man.

The unresolved conflict between Tolstoy's belief that the attributes

of personal life alone were real and his doctrine that analysis of them

is insufficient to explain the course of history (i.e. the behaviour of

societies) is paralleled, at a profounder and more personal level, by

the conflict between, on the one hand, his own gifts both as a writer

and as a man and, on the other, his ideals-that which he sometimes

believed himself to be, and at all times profoundly believed in, and

wished to be.

so

THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

If we may recall once again our division of artists into foxes and

hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection

of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and

penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he believed only in one vast,

unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers

of insight into the variety of life-the differences, the contrasts, the

collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its

absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a

precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one

has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact

quality of a feeling-the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow,

the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on

his part) -the inner and outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought,

a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire

period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.

The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his

world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every

ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were; never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an

impressionistic representation : nor yet calling for, and dependent on,

some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a

solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space-an event fully present to the senses

or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and

firmly articulated.

Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single

embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many

levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level-in War and

Peact, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open

soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic

divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic, some simple,

quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly,

and all the items can be assessed in terms of one another by some

simple measuring rod. Tolstoy's genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the

presence o.f the object itself, and not of a mere description of it,

5 1

RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S

employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality o f a

particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which

relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences-'the

oscillations of feeling'-in favour of what is common to them all. But

then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury,

particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity

of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very

simple standard : say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the gospels

declare to be good.

This violent contradiction between the data of experience from

which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life

he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the

existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear

to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive j udgment and theoretical conviction-between his gifts and his opinions-mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life with its sense

of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement

-all of which is nevertheless illusion; and the laws which govern

everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion

of them-so that all scientists and historians who say that they do

know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving- but which

nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogo! and Dostoevsky,

whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy's 'sanity', are

well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single

vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its

marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which

yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himselffails to forget-what he is doing, and why.

I V

Theories are seldom born i n the void. And the question of the roots

of Tolstoy's vision of history is therefore a reasonable one. Everything

that Tolstoy writes on history has a stamp of his own original personality, a first-hand quality denied to most writers on abstract topics.

On these subjects he wrote as an amateur, not as a professional; but

let it be remembered that he belonged to the world of great affairs:

he was a member of the ruling class of his country and his time, and

knew and understood it completely; he lived in an environment

exceptionally crowded with theories and ideas, he examined a great

deal of material for W or and Peace (though, as several Russian scholars

52

THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

have shown,1 not as much as is sometimes supposed), he travelled a

great deal, and met many notable public figures in Germany and

France.

That he read widely, and was influenced by what he read, cannot

be doubted. It is a commonplace that he owed a great deal to Rousseau,

and probably derived from him, as much as from Diderot and the

French Enlightenment, his analytic, anti-historical ways of approaching social problems, in particular the tendency to treat them in terms of timeless, logical, moral, and metaphysical categories, and not look

for their essence, as the German historical school advocated, in terms

of growth, and of response to a changing historical environment. He

remained an admirer of Rousseau, and late in life still recommended

Emile as the best book ever written on education.2 Rousseau must have

strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to

idealise the soil and its cultivatCJrs-the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy

is a repository of almost as rich a stock of'natural' virtues as Rousseau's

noble savage. Rousseau, too, must have reinforced the coarse-grained,

rough peasant in Tolstoy with his strongly moralistic, puritanical

strain, his suspicion of, and antipathy to, the rich, the powerful, the

happy as such, his streak of genuine vandalism, and occasional bursts

of blind, very Russian rage against western sophistication and refinement, and that adulation of 'virtue' and simple tastes, of the 'healthy'

moral life, the militant, anti-liberal barbarism, which is one of

Rousseau's specific contributions to the stock of Jacobin ideas. And

perhaps Rousseau influenced him also in setting so high a value upon

family life, and in his doctrine of superiority of the heart over the head,

of moral over intellectual or aesthetic virtues. This has been noted

before, and it is true and illuminating, but it does not account for

Tolstoy's theory of history, of which little trace can be found in the

profoundly unhistorical Rousseau. Indeed in so far as Rousseau seeks

to derive the right of some men to authority over others from a theory

of the transference of power in accordance with the Social Contract,

Tolstoy contemptuously refutes him.

We get somewhat nearer to the truth if we consider the influence

1 For example, both Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum in the works cited above

(p. 26, note 3, and p. 4-B, note 1 ).

1 'On n'a pas rendu justice l Rousseau . . . J'ai lu tout Rousseau, oui,

tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnairt tit musiyue. Je faisais mieux

que }'admirer; je lui rendais une culte v�ritable . . .' (see P· s6, note I below).

5 3

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

upon Tolstoy o f his romantic and conservative Slavophil contemporaries. He was close to some among them, particularly to Pogodin and Samarin, in the mid-6os when he was writing War and Ptatt,

and certainly shared their antagonism to the scientific theories of

history then fashionable, whether to the metaphysical positivism of

Comte and his followers, or the more materialistic views of Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, as well as those of Buckle and Mill and Herbert Spencer, and the general British empiricist tradition, tinged by French

and German scientific materialism, to which these very different

figures all, in their various fashions, belonged. The Slavophils (and

perhaps especially Tyutchev, whose poetry Tolstoy admired so deeply)

may have done something to discredit for him historical theories

modelled upon the natural sciences, which, for Tolstoy no less than

for Dostoevsky, failed to give a true account of what men did and

suffered. They were inadequate if only because they ignored man's

'inner' experience, treated him as a natural object played upon by

the same forces as all the other constituents of the material world, and

taking the French Encyclopedists at their word, tried to study social

behaviour as one might study a beehive or an ant-hill, and then

complained because the laws which they formulated failed to explain

the behaviour of living men and women. These romantic medievalists

may moreover have strengthened Tolstoy's natural anti-intellectualism

and anti-liberalism, and his deeply sceptical and pessimistic view of the

strength of non-rational motives in human behaviour, which at once

dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves-in short

that innate conservatism of outlook which very early made Tolstoy

deeply suspect to the radical Russian intelligentsia of the 50s and 6os,

and led them to think of him uneasily as being after all a count,

an officer and a reactionary, not one of themselves, not genuinely

enlightened or rlvolti at all, despite his boldest protests against the

political system, his heterodoxies, his destructive nihilism.

But although Tolstoy and the Slavophils may have fought a common

enemy, their positive views diverged sharply. The Slavophil doctrine

derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling's

view, despite much lip-service to Hegel and his interpreters, that true

knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only by a

kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the

universe-the soul of the world, such as artists and thinkers have in

moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this

with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religion and the mystical

54

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E F O X

tradition of the Russian Church, and bequeathed i t to the Russian

symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generation. Tolstoy stood

at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient

empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this

knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the

truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and

nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are

inspired vehicles of the divine affiatus. There is a hard cutting edge

of common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote which automatically puts to Right metaphysical fantasies and undisciplined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical or theological

interpretations of life, which lay at the heart of the Slavophil outlook,

and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the

west), determined both its hatred of politics and economics in the

ordinary sense, and its mystical nationalism. Moreover, the Slavophils

were worshippers of historical method as alone disclosing the true

nature- revealed only in its impalpable growth in time-of individual

institutions and abstract sciences alike. None of this could possibly

have found a sympathetic echo in the very tough-minded, very matterof-fact Tolstoy, especially the realistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataev has something in common with the

agrarian ethos of the Slavophil (and indeed pan-Slav) ideologistssimple rural wisdom as against the absurdities of the over-clever westyet Pierre Bezukhov in the early drafts of War and Ptau ends his life as a Decembrist and an exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived

in all his spiritual wanderings as ultimately finding comfort in any

metaphysical system, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox, or any

other, established, Church. The Slavophils saw through the pretensions of western social and psychological science, and that was sympathetic to Tolstoy; but their positive doctrines interested him little. He was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against

any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo: his hostile picture of the freemasons in War and Peace remained symptomatic of his attitude to the end. This can only have been reinfor-ced by his interest in the

writings of, and his visit in 1 861 to, the exiled Proudhon, whose

confused irrationalism, puritanism, hatred of authority and bourgeois

intellectuals, and general Rousseauis.m and violence of tone evidently

pleased him. It is more than possible that he took the title of his novel

from Proudhon's La Gutrrt tt Ia paix published in the same year.

If the classical German Idealists had had no direct effect upon

55

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

Tolstoy, there was at least one German philosopher for whom h e did

express admiration. And indeed it is not difficult to see why he found

Schopenhauer attractive: that solitary thinker drew a gloomy picture

of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly

determined laws of the universe; he spoke of the vanity of all human

passions, the absurdity of rational systems, the universal failure to

understand the non-rational springs of action and feeling, the suffering

to which all flesh is subject, and the consequent desirability of reducing

human vulnerability by reducing man himself to the condition of the

utmost quietism, where, being passionless, he cannot be frustrated or

humiliated or wounded. This celebrated doctrine reflected Tolstoy's

later views-that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is

foolishly ambitious and grotesquely over-estimates his capacities; from

Schopenhauer, too, may come the bitter emphasis laid on the familiar

contrast of the illusion of free will with the reality of the iron laws

which govern the w:orld, in particular the account of the inevitable

suffering which this illusion, since it cannot be made to vanish, must

necessarily cause. This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the

central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the

cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they

can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of

which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually

perceives is meaningless chaos-a chaos of which the heightened form,

the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an

intense degree, is war.

The best avowed of all Tolstoy's literary debts is, of course, that

to Stendhal. In his celebrated interview in 1 90 1 with Paul Boyer,1

Tolstoy coupled Stendhal and Rousseau as the two writers to whom

he owed most, and added that all he had learnt about war he had learnt

from Stendhal's description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartrtuu

dt Parme, where Fabrice wanders about the battlefield 'understanding

nothing'. And he added that this conception-war 'without panacht' or

'embellishments' -of which his brother Nikolay had spoken to him,

he later had verified for himself during his own service in the Crimean

War. Nothing ever won so much praise from active soldiers as

Tolstoy's vigntttes of episodes in the war, his descriptions of how

1 See PaMI Boytr (r864-1949) d1tZ Tolitoi' (Pari!, 1950), p. 40.

s6

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

battles appear to those who are actually engaged in them. No doubt

Tolstoy was right in declaring that he owed much of this dry light to

Stendhal. But there is a figure behind Stendhal even drier, even more

destructive, from whom Stendhal may well, at least in part, have

derived his new method of interpreting social life, a celebrated writer

with whose works Tolstoy was certainly acquainted and to whom he

owed a deeper debt than is commonly supposed; for the striking

resemblance between their views can hardly be put down either to

accident, or to the mysterious operations of the Ztitgtist. This figure

was the famous Joseph de Maistre; and the full story of his in8uence

on Tolstoy, although it has been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by

at least one critic of Maistre,1 still largely remains to be written.

v

On I· November a 865, in the middle of writing /.Par and Ptau,

Tolstoy wrote down in his diary 'I am reading Maistre',1 and on 7

September 1 866 he wrote to the editor Bartenev, who acted as a kind

of general assistant to him, asking him to send the 'Maistre archive',

i.e. his letters and notes. There is every reason why Tolstoy should

have read this now relatively little read author. Count Joseph de

Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had first made a name for

himself by writing anti-revolutionary tracts during the last years of

the eighteenth century. Although normally classified as an orthodox

Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a

defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal

authority, he was a great deal more than this. He held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in hurpan affairs by the passion for self-immolation which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates

armies and civil societies alike; he emphasised the need for absolute

authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and

order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his

1 See Adolfo Omodeo, u, rtazio,ario (Bari, 1939), p. 1 1 %, note %.

1 'Chitayu "Maistre" ', quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48,

note 1 above), vol. z, p. 309·

57

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

wnung are closer to Nietzsche, d'Annunzio, and the heralds of

modern fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time, and

caused a stir in their own day both among the legitimists and in

Napoleonic France. In I 803 Maistre was sent by his master, the King

of Savoy, then living in exile in Rome as a victim of Napoleon and

soon forced to move to Sardinia, as his semi-official representative to

the Court of St Petersburg. Maistre, who possessed considerable social

charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, made a great

impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished

courtier, a wit and a shrewd political observer. He remained in St

Petersburg from I 803 to I 8 I 7, and his exquisitely written and often

uncannily penetrating and prophetic diplomatic dispatches and letters,

as well as his private correspondence and the various scattered notes

on Russia and her inhabitants, sent to his government as well as to his

friends and consultants among the Russian nobility, form a uniquely

valuable source of information about the life and opinions of the ruling

circles of the Russian Empire during and immediately after the

Napoleonic period.

He died in I 82 I , the author of several theologico-political essays,

but the definitive edition of his works, in particular of the celebrated

Soirees de Saint-Pitershourg, which in the form of Platonic dialogue

dealt with the nature and sanctions of human government and other

political and philosophical problems, as well as his Corrtspondance

diplomatique and his letters, was published in full only in the 50s and

early 6os by his son Rodolphe and by others. Maistre's open hatred

of Austria, his anti-Bonapartism, as well as the rising importance of

the Piedmontese kingdom before and after the Crimean War, naturally

increased interest in his personality and his thought at this date. Books

on him began to appear and excited a good deal of discussion in Russian

literary and historical circles. Tolstoy possessed the Soirees, as well as

Maistre's diplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them

were to be found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. It is in any case

quite clear that Tolstoy used them extensively in War and Peact.1

Thus the celebrated description of Paulucci's intervention in the

debate of the Russian General Staff at Drissa is reproduced almost

verbatim from a letter by Maistre. Similarly Prince Vasily's conversation at Mme Scherer's reception with the 'homme de beaucoup de merite' about Kutuzov, is obviously based on a letter by Maistre, in

1 See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48, note I above).

sa

THE H ED G E H O G AND THE FOX

which all the French phnses with which this conversation is sprinkled

are to be found. There is, moreover, a marginal note in one of

Tolstoy's early drafts, 'At Anna Pavlovna's J. Maistre', which refers

to the rarmte11r who tells the beautiful Helene and an admiring circle

of listeners the idiotic anecdote about the meeting of Napoleon with

the Due d'Enghien at supper with t�e celebrated actress MlleGeorges.

Again, old Prince Bolkonsky's habit of shifting his bed from one room

to another is probably taken from a story which Maistre tells about

the similar habit of Count Stroganov. Finally the name of Maistre

occurs in the novel itself, as being a01ong those who agree that it

would be embarrassing and senseless to capture the more eminent

princes and marshals of Napoleon's army, since this would merely

create diplomatic difficulties. Zhikharev, whose memoirs Tolstoy is

know11 to have used, met Maistre in 1 807, and described him in

glowing colours;1 something of the atmosphere to be found in these

memoirs enters into Tolstoy's description of the eminent �migr� in

Anna Pavlovna Scherer's drawing-room, with which War and Peau

opens, and his other references to fashionable Petersburg society at

this date. These echoes and parallels have been collated carefully by

Tolstoyan scholars, and leave no doubt about the extent of Tolstoy's

borrowing.

Among these parallels there are similarities of a more important

kind. Maistre explains that the victory of the legendary Horatius over

the Curiatii-like all victories in general -was due to the intangible

factor of morale, and Tolstoy similarly speaks of the supreme importance of this unknown quantity in determining the outcome of battlesthe impalpable 'spirit' of troops and their commanders. This emphasis on the imponderable and the incalculable is part and parcel of Maistre's

general irrationalism. More clearly and boldly than anyone before

him Maistre declared that the human intellect was bu� a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of natural forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explained anything. He maintained that only the irrational, precisely because it defied explanation and could therefore not be undermined by the critical activities of reason, was

able to persist and be strong. And he gave as examples such irrational

institutions as hereditary monarchy and marriage, which �urvived

from age to age, while such rational institutions as dective monarchy,

1 S. P. Zhikharev, Z.pisli swrtmtflflila (Moscow, 1934-), vol. 2, pp. 1 1 2-

1 3.

59

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

o r 'free' personal relationships, swiftly and for no obvious 'reason'

collapsed wherever they were introduced. Maistre conceived of life

as a savage battle at all levels, between plants and animals no less than

individuals and nations, a battle from which no gain was expected,

but which originated in some primal, mysterious, sanguinary, selfimmolatory craving implanted by God. This instinct was far more powerful than the feeble efforts of rational men who tried to achieve

peace and happiness (which was, in any case, not the deepest desire of

the human heart-only of its caricature, the liberal intellect) by planning

the life of society without reckoning with the violent forces which

sooner or later would inevitably cause their puny structures to collapse

like so many houses of cards. Maistre regarded the battlefield as

typical of life in all its aspects, and derided the generals who thought

that they were in fact controlling the movements of their troops and

directing the course of the battle. He dedared that no one in the

actual heat of battle can begin to tell what is going on :

On parle beaucoup de batailles dans le monde sans savoir ce que

c'est; on est surtout assez sujet � les considerer comme des points,

tandis qu'elles couvrent deux ou trois lieues de pays: on vous dit

gravement: Comment ne savez-vous pas ce qui s'est passe dans ce

combat puisque vous y etiez? tandis que c'est precisement le contraire

qu'on polurait dire assez souvent. Celui qui est � Ia droite sait-il ce

qui se passe � Ia gauche? sait-il seulement ce qui se passe � deux pas

de lui? Je me represente aisement une de ces scenes epouvantables:

sur un vaste terrain couvert de tous les apprets du carnage, et qui

semble s'ebranler sous les pas des hommes et des chevaux; au milieu

du feu et des tourbillons de fumee; etourdi, transporte par le

retentissement des armes � feu et des instruments militaires, par des

voix qui commandent, qui hurlent ou qui s'eteignent; environne de

morts, de mourants, de cadavres mutiles; possede tour a tour par

Ia crainte, par !'esperance, par Ia rage, par cinq ou six ivresses

differentes, que devient l'homme? que voit-il? que sait-il au bout

de quelques heures? que peut-il sur lui et sur les autres? Parmi cette

foule de guerriers qui ont combattu tout le jour, il n'y en a souvent

pas un seul, et pas meme le general, qui sache ou est le vainqueur.

II ne tiendnit qu'a moi de vous citer des batailles modernes, des

batailles fameuses dont Ia memoire ne perira jamais, des batailles

qui ont change Ia face des affaires en Europe, et qui n'ont ete

perdues que parce que tel ou tel homme a cru qu'elles l'etaient; de

manil:re qu'en supposant toutes les circonstances egales, et pas une

goutte de sang de plus versee de part et d'autre, un autre general

6o

THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX

aurait fait chanter le Tt Dtum chez lui, et fore� l'histoire de dire

tout le contraire de ce qu'elle" dira.1

And later:

N'avons-nous pas fini m�me par voir perdre des batailles gagn�es?

. . . Je crois en general que les batailles ne se gagnent ni ne se

perdent point physiquement.1

A nd again, in a similar strain:

De m8me une armee de .f.O,OOO hommes est inf�rieure physiquement t une autre armee de 6o,ooo: mais si Ia premiere a plus de courage, d'experience et de discipline, elle pourra battre Ia seconde;

car elle a plus d'action avec moins de 1Ila.S$C, et c'est ce que nous

voyons t chaque page de l'histoire.3

And finally:

C'est }'opinion qui perd les batailles, et c'est !'opinion qui les

gagne.'

Victory is a moral or psychological, not a physical issue:

qu'est ce qu'une botailk perdue? . . . Cest une botaille qu'on croit

avDir ptrdut. Rien n'est plus vrai. Un homme qui se bat avec un

autre est vaincu lorsqu'il est tu� ou ter�. et que }'autre est debout;

il n'en est pas ainsi de deux arm�: l'une ne peut @tre tuee, tand.is

que }'autre reste en pied. Les forces se balancent ainsi que les mons,

et depuis surtout que }'invention de Ia poudre a mis plus d'�it�

dans les moyens de destruction, une bataille ne se perd plus mat�riellement; c'est-t-dire parce qu'il y a plus de morts d'un cOt� que de

)'autre: aussi Fr�d�ric II, qui s'y entendait un peu, disait: Yainrrt,

c'tst avanctr. Mais que} est celui qui avance? c'est celui dont Ia

conscience et Ia contenance font reculer l'autrc.6

There is and can be no military science, for 'C'est }'imagination qui

perd les bataill�',8 and 'peu de batailles sont perdues physiquement-

1 J. de Maistre, us Soirlts tk Silitrt-Pittrs6Durg {Paris, 196o), entretien 7,

P· :n8.

I ibid., P· 229.

1 ibid., pp. Z:Z.f.·S· The last sentence ia reproduced by Tolltoy almost

verbatim.

' ibid., p. z:z6.

1 ibid., pp. 226-7.

1 ibid., p. 227.

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

vous tirez, je tire • • . le viritable vainqueur, comme le viritable vainaa,

c'est celui qui croit l'etre'.1

This is the lesson which Tolstoy says he derives from Stendhal,

but the words of Prince Andrey about Austerlitz-'We lost because

we told ourselves we lost' -as well as the attribution of Russian victory

over Napoleon to the strength of the Russian desire to survive, echo

Maistre and not Stendhal.

This close parallelism between Maistre's and Tolstoy's views about

the chaos and uncontrollability of battles and wars, with its larger

implications for human life generally, together with the contempt of

both for the naive explanations provided by academic historians to

account for human violence and lust for war, was noted by the eminent

French historian Albert Sorel, in a little-known lecture to the Ecole

des Sciences Politiques delivered on 7 April 1 888.1 He drew a parallel

between Maistre and Tolstoy, and observed that although Maistre

was a theocrat, while Tolstoy was a 'nihilist', yet both regarded the

first causes of events as mysterious, involving the reduction of human

wills to nullity. 'The distance', wrote Sorel, 'from the theocrat to the

mystic, and from the mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from

the butterAy to the larva, from the larva to the chrysalis, from the

chrysalis to the butterAy.' Tolstoy resembles Maistre in being, above

all, curious about first causes, in asking such questions as Maistre's

'Expliquez pourquoi a qu'il y a de plus honorable dons le monde au

jugement de tout le genre lzumoin sons exception, est le droit de vmer

innocemment le song innocent.?',l in rejecting all rationalist or

naturalistic answers, in stressing impalpable psychological and 'spiritual'

-and sometimes 'zoological' -factors as determining events, and in

stressing these at the expense of statistical analyses of military strength,

very much like Maistre in his dispatches to his government at Cagliari.

• Letters, I4 September I8u.

2 Alben Sorel, 'Tolstol historien', Revue bkue 4I (January-June I888),

46o-79· This lecture, reprinted in Sorel's Lectures bisturiqru:s (Paris, I894), has

been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views

of those (e.g. P. I. Biryukov and K. V. Pokrovskyin their works cited above [p. 15,

note I; p. 41, note z], not to mention later critics and literary historians who

almost all rely upon their authority) who omit all reference to Maistre. Emile

Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities, and discovering the truth for himself; see his Lil Culture frlmfllist en Rlmie (I700-I9oo) (Paris, I9Io), pp. 490-z.

J op. cit. (p. 6I, note I above), entretien 7, pp. Z l l-I J.

6:z

T H E HEDG E H O G AND T H E FOX

Indeed, Tolstoy's accounts of mass movements-in .battle, and in the

flight of the Russians from Moscow or of the French from Russiamight almost be designed to give concrete illustrations of Maistre's theory of the unplanned and unplannable character of all great events.

But the parallel runs deeper. The Savoyard Count and the Russian

are both reacting, and reacting violently, against liberal optimism

concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress: both furiously denounce the notion that mankind can be made eternally happy and virtuous by rational and

scientific means.

The first great wave of optimistic rationalism which followed the

Wars of Religion broke against the violence of the great French

Revolution and the political despotism and social and economic misery

which ensued : in Russia a similar development was shattered by the

long succession of repressive measures taken by Nicholas I to counteract firstly the effect of the Decembrist revolt, and, nearly a quarter of a century later, the influence of the European revolutions of 1 848-9;

and to this must be added the material and moral effect, a decade later,

of the Crimean debacle. In both cases the emergence of naked force

killed a great deal of tender-minded idealism, and resulted in various

types of realism and toughness - among others, materialistic socialism,

authoritarian neo-feudalism, blood-and-iron nationalism and other

bitterly anti-liberal movements. In the case of both Maistre and

Tolstoy, for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural,

and religious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an

acute scepticism about scientific method as such, distrust of all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism then influential in western Europe; and led to a deliberate

emphasis on the 'unpleasant' aspects of _human history, from which

sentimental romantics, humanist historians, and optimistic social

theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting their gaze.

Both Maistre and Tolstoy spoke of political reformers (in one

interesting instance, of the same individual representative of them, the

Russian statesman Speransky) in the same tone of bitterly contem�

tuous irony. Maistre was suspected of having had an actual hand in

Speransky's fall and exile; Tolstoy, through the eyes of Prince Andrey,

describes the pale face of Alexander's one-time favourite, his soft hands,

his fussy and self-important manner, the artificiality and emptiness of

his movements-as somehow indicative of the unreality of his person

and of his liberal activities-in a manner which Maistre could only

63

R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S

have applauded. Both speak of intellectuals with scorn and hostility.

Maistre regards them as being not merely grotesque casualties of the

historical process - hideous cautions created by Providence to scare

mankind into return to the ancient Roman faith-but as beings

dangerous to society, a pestilential sect of questioners and corrupters

of youth against whose corrosive activity all prudent rulers must take

measures. Tolstoy treats them with contempt rather than hatred, and

represents them as poor, misguided, feeble-witted creatures with

delusions of grandeur. Maistre sees them as a brood of social and

political locusts, as a canker at the heart of Christian civilisation which

is of all things the most sacred and will be preserved only by the heroic

efforts of the Pope and his Church. Tolstoy looks on them as clever

fools, spinners of empty subtleties, blind and deaf to the realities which

simpler hearts can grasp, and from time to time he lets fly at them

with the brutal violence of a grim, anarchical old peasant, avenging

himself, after years of silence, on the silly, chattering, town-bred

monkeys, so knowing, and full of words to explain everything, and

superior, and impotent and empty. Both dismiss any interpretation of

history which does not place at the heart of it the problem of the nature

of power, and both speak with disdain about rationalistic attempts to

explain it. Maistre amuses himself at the expense of the Encyclopedists- their clever superficialities, their neat but empty categoriesvery much in the manner adopt�d by Tolstoy towards their descendants a century later-the scientific sociologists and historians. Both profess

belief in the deep wisdom of the uncorrupted common people, although

Maistre's mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism, venality

and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been to Tolstoy's taste, if

indeed he ever read them.

Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the western world as in some

sense 'rotting', as being in rapid decay. This was the doctrine which

the Roman Catholic counter-revolutionaries at the turn of the century

virtually invented, and it formed part of their view of the French

Revolution as a divine punishment visited upon those who strayed

from the Christian faith and in particular that of the Roman Church.

From France this denunciation of secularism was carried by many

devious routes, mainly by second-rate journalists and their academic

readers, to Germany and to Russia (to Russia both directly and via

German versions), where it found a ready soil among those who,

having themselves avoided the revolutionary upheavals, found it

flattering to their amour proprt to believe that they, at any rate, might

64

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

still be on the path to greater power and glory, while the west, destroyed

by the failure of its ancient faith, was fast disintegrating morally and

politically. No doubt Tolstoy derived this element in his outlook at

least as much from Slavophils and other Russian chauvinists as directly

from Maistre, but it is worth noting that this belief is exceptionally

powerful in both these dry and aristocratic observers, and governs

their oddly similar outlooks. Both were au fond unyieldingly pessimistic thinkers, whose ruthless destruction of current illusions frightened off their contemporaries even when they reluctantly conceded the truth of what was said. bespite the fact that Maistre was fanatically ultramontane and a supporter of established institutions,

while Tolstoy, unpolitical in his earlier work, gave no evidence of

radical sentiment, both were obscurely felt to be nihilistic-the humane

values of the nineteenth century fell to pieces under their fingers. Both

sought for some escape from their own inescapable and unanswerable

scepticism in some vast, impregnable truth which would protect them

from the effects of their own natural inclinations and temperament:

Maistre in the Church, Tolstoy in the uncorrupted human heart and

simple brotherly love-a state he could have known but seldom, an ideal

before the vision of which all his descriptive skill deserts him and usually

yields something inartistic, wooden and naive; painfully touching, painfully unconvincing, and conspicuously remote from his own experience.

Yet the analogy must not be overstressed : it is true that both

Maistre and Tolstoy attach the greatest possible importance to war

and conflict, b�t Maistre, like Proudhon after him,1 glorifies war, and

1 Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1 861, the year in which the

latter published a work which was called La Gu�rrt tlla paix, translated into

Russian three years later. On the basis of this fact Eikhenbaum tries to deduce

the influence of Proudhon upon Tolstoy's novel. Proudhon follows Maistre

in regarding the origins of wars as a dark and sacred mystery; and there is

much confused irrationalism, puritanism, love of paradox, and general

Rousseauism in all his work. But these qualities are widespread in radical

French thought, and it is difficult to find anything specifically Proudhonist

in Tolstoy's War and P�au, besides the title. The extent of Proudhon'a

general influence on all kinds of Russian intellectuals during this period was,

of course, very large; it would thus be just as easy, indeed easier, to construct

a case for regarding Dostoevsky- or Maxim Gorky-as a ProudAonisanl as to

look on Tolitoy as one; yet this would be no more than an idle exercise in

critical ingenuity; for the resemblances are vague and general, while the

differences are deeper, more numerous and more specific.

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

declares i t to b e mysterious and divine, while Tolstoy detests it and

regards it as in principle explicable if only we knew enough of the

many minute causes- the celebrated 'differential' of history. Maistre

believed in authority because it was an irrational force, he believed in

the need to submit, in the inevitability of crime and the supreme

importance of inquisitions and punishment. He regarded the executioner as the cornerstone of society, and it was not for nothing that Stendhal called him I 'ami du hourreau and Lamennais said of him

that there were only two realities for him-crime and punishment

'his works are as though written on the scaffold'. Maistre's vision of

the world is one of savage creatures tearing each other limb from

limb, killing for the sake of killing, with violence and blood, which

he sees as the normal condition of all animate life. Tolstoy is far from

such horror, crime, and sadism : 1 and he is not, pace Albert Sorel and

Vogue, in any sense a mystic: he has no fear of questioning anything,

and believes that some simple answer must exist-if only we did not

insist on tormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and

remote places, when it lies all the time at our feet. Maistre supported

the principle of hierarchy and believed in a self-sacrificing aristocracy,

heroism, obedience, and the most rigid control of the masses by their

social and theological superiors. Accordingly, he advocated that

education in Russia be placed in the hands of the Jesuits; they would

at least inculcate into the barbarous Scythians the Latin language,

which was the sacred tongue of humanity if only because it embodied

the prejudices and superstitions of previous ages-beliefs which had

stood the test of history and experience-alone able to form a wall

strong enough to keep out the terrible acids of atheism, liberalism,

and freedom of thought. Above all he regarded natural science and

secular literature as dangerous commodities in the hands of those

not completely indoctrinated against them, a heady wine which

would dangerously excite, and in the end destroy, any society not

used to it.

Tolstoy all his life fought against open obscurantism and artificial

repression of the desire for knowledge; his harshest words were

directed against those Russian statesmen and publicists in the last

1 Yet Tolstoy, too, says that millions of men kill each other, knowing

that it is physically and morally evil, because it is 'necessary'; because in

doing so, men 'ful.6.lled . . . an elemental, zoological law'. This is pure

Maistre, and very remote from Stendhal or Rousseau.

66

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E F O X

quarter of the nineteenth century- Pobedonostsev and his friends and

minions-who practised precisely these maxims of the great Catholic

reactionary. The author of War and Ptace plainly hated the Jesuits,

and particularly detested their success in converting Russian ladies of

fashion during Alexander's reign-the final events in the life of Pierre's

worthless wife, Helene, might almost have been founded upon

Maistre's activities as a missionary to the aristocracy of St Petersburg:

indeed, there is every reason to think that the Jesuits were expelled

from Russia, and Maistre himself was virtually recalled, when his

interference was deemed too overt and too successful by the Emperor

himself.

Nothing, therefore, would have shocked and irritated Tolstoy so

much as to be told that he had a great deal in common with this

apostle of darkness, this defender of ignorance and serfdom. N evertheless, of all writers on social questions, Maistre's tone most nearly resembles that of Tolstoy. Both preserve the same sardonic, almost

cynical, disbelief in the improvement of society by rational means, by

the enactment of good laws or the propagation of scientific knowledge.

Both speak with the same angry irony of every fashionable explanation,

every social nostrum, particularly of the ordering and planning of

society in accordance with some man-made formula. In Maistre

openly, and in Tolstoy less obviously, there is a deeply sceptical attitude

towards all experts and all techniques, all high-minded professions of

secular faith and efforts at social improvement by well-meaning but,

alas, idealistic persons; there is the same distaste for anyone who deals

in ideas, who believes in abstract principles: and both are deeply

affected by Voltaire's temper, and bitterly reject his views. Both

ultimately appeal to some elemental source concealed in the souls of

men, Maistre even while denouncing Rousseau as a false prophet,

Tolstoy with his more ambiguous attitude towards him. Both above

all reject the concept of individual political liberty: of civil rights

guaranteed by some impersonal system of justice. Maistre, because he

regarded any desire for personal freedom-whether political or economic or social or cultural or religious-as wilful indiscipline and stupid insubordination, and supported tradition in its most darkly i!"rational

and repressive forms, because it alone provided the energy which gave

life, continuity, and safe anchorage to social institutions; Tolstoy

rejected political reform because he believed that ultimate regeneration

could come only from within, and that the inner life was only lived

truly in the untouched depths of the mass of the people.

67

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

V I

But there is a larger and more important parallel between Tolstoy's

interpretation of history and the ideas of Maistre, and it raises issues

of fundamental principle concerning knowledge of the past. One of

the most striking elements common to the thought of these dissimilar,

and indeed antagonistic, pmuurs, is their preoccupation with the

'inexorable' character-the 'march'-of events. Both Tolstoy and

Maistre think of what occurs as a thick, opaque, inextricably complex

web of events, objects, characteristics, connected and divided by

literally innumerable unidentifiable links-and gaps and sudden discontinuities too, visible and invisible. It is a view of reality which makes all clear, logical and scientific constructions- the well defined,

symmetrical patterns of human reason-seem smooth, thin, empty,

'abstract' and totally ineffective as means either of description or of

analysis of anything that lives, or has ever lived. Maistre attributes

this to the incurable impotence of human powers of observation and

of reasoning, at least when they function without the aid of the superhuman sources of knowledge-faith, revelation, tradition, above all the mystical vision of the great saints and doctors of the Church, their

unanalysable, special sense of reality to which natural science, free

criticism and the secular spirit are fatal. The wisest of the Greeks,

many among the great Romans, and after them the dominant ecclesiastics and statesmen of the Middle Ages, Maistre tells us, possessed this insight; from it flowed their power, their dignity and their success.

The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation :

hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts

and technicians-the Gratculus uuritns-the remote but unmistakable

ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian

Age-the terriblf' Eighteenth Century-all the lcrivasurit tt avocasstrit

- the miserable crew of scribblers and attorneys, with the predatory,

sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and selfdestructive, because blind and deaf to the true Word of God. Only the Church t:nderstands the 'inner' rhythms, the 'deeper' currents of

the world, the silent march of things; non in commotiont Dominus; not

in noisy democratic !llanifestos nor in the rattle of constitutional

formulas, nor in revolutionary violence, but in the eternal natural

order, governed by 'natural' law. Only those who understand it know

what can and what cannot be achieved, what should and what should

not be attempted. They and they alone hold the key to secular success

68

THE H ED G E H O G AND T H E FOX

as well as to spiritual salvation. Omniscience belongs only to God. But

only by immersing ourselves in His Word- His theological or metaphysical principles, embodied at their lowest in instincts and ancient superstitions which are but primitive ways, tested by time, of divining

and obeying His laws-whereas reasoning is an effort to substitute

one's own arbitrary rules-dare we hope for wisdom. Practical wisdom

is to a large degree knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our

world order, could not but happen; and conversely, of how things

cannot be, or could not have been, done; of why some schemes must,

cannot help but, end in failure, although for this no demonstrative or

scientific reason can be given. The rare capacity for seeing this we

righdy call a 'sense of reality'-it is a sense of what fits with what, of

what cannot exist with what; and it goes by many names: insight,

wisdom, practical genius, a sense of the past, an understanding of life

and of human character.

Tolstoy's view is not very different; save that he gives as the reason

for the folly of our exaggerated claims to understand or determine

events not foolish or blasphemous efforts to do without special, i.e.

supernatural knowledge, but our ignorance of too many among the

vast number of interrelations-the minute determining causes of

events; if we began to know the causal network in its infinite variety,

we should cease to praise and blame, boast and regret, or look on

human beings as heroes or villains, but should submit with due

humility to unavoidable necessity. Yet to say no more than this is to

give a travesty of his beliefs. It is indeed Tolstoy's explicit doctrine in

War and Ptoct that all truth is in science-in the knowledge of material

causes-and that we consequently render ourselves ridiculous by

arriving at conclusions on too little evidence, comparing in this

regard unfavourably with peasants or savages who, being not so

very much more ignorant, at least make more modest claims; but

this is not the view of the world that, in fact, underlies either W or and

Ptoct or Anno Kormino or any other work which belongs to this

period of Tolstoy's life. Kutuzov is wise and not merely clever as, for

example, the time-serving Drubetskoy or Bilibin are clever, and he

is not a victim to abstract theories or dogma as the German military

experts are; he is unlike them, and is wiser than they-but this is so

not because he knows more facts than they and has at his finger tips

a greater number of the 'minute causes' of events than his advisers or

his adversaries-than Pfuel or Paulucci or Berthier or the King of

Naples. Karataev brings light to Pierre, whereas the Freemasons did

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RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S

not, but this i s so not because h e happens to have scientific information

superior to that possessed by the Moscow lodges; Levin goes through

an experience during his work in the fields, and Prince Andrey while

lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, but in neither case

has there been a discovery of fresh facts or of new laws in any ordinary

sense. On the contrary, the greater one's accumulation of facts, the

more futile one's activity, the more hopeless one's failure-as shown by

the group of reformers who surround ·Alexander. They and men like

them are only saved from Faustian despair by stupidity (like the

Germans and the military experts and experts ge:1erally) or by vanity

(like Napoleon) or by frivolity (like Oblonsky) or by heartlessness (like

Karenin). What is it that Pierre, Prince Andrey, Levin discover? And

what are they searching for, and what is the centre and climax of the

spiritual crisis resolved by the experience that transforms their lives?

Not the chastening realisation of how little of the totality of facts

and laws known to Laplace's omniscient observer they- Pierre, Levin

and the rest-can claim to have discovered; not a simple admission of

Socratic ignorance. Still less does it consist in what is almost at the

opposite pole-in a new, a more precise awareness of the 'iron laws'

that govern our lives, in a vision of nature as a machine or a factory,

in the cosmology of the great materialists, Diderot or Lamettrie or

Cabanis, or of the mid-nineteenth century scientific writers idolised by

the 'nihilist' Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children; nor yet in

some transcendent sense of the inexpressible oneness of life to which

poets, mystics and metaphysicians have in all ages testified. Nevertheless, something is perceived ; there is a vision, or at least a glimpse, a moment of revelation which in some sense explains and reconciles, a

theodicy, a justification of what exists and happens, as well as its

elucidation. What does it consist in? Tolstoy does not tell us in so

many words: for when (in his later, explicitly dida<:tic works) he sets

out to do so, his doctrine is no longer the same. Yet no reader of

War and Peace can be wholly unaware of what he is being told. And

that not only in the Kutuzov or Karataev scenes, or other quasitheological or quasi-metaphysical passages- but even more, for example, in the narrative, non-philosophical section of the epilogue, in which

Pierre, Natasha, Nikolay Rostov, Princess Marie are shown anchored

in their new solid, sober lives with their established day to day routine.

We are here plainly intended to see that these 'heroes' of the novelthe 'good' people-have now, after the storms and agonies of ten years and more, achieved a kind of peace, based on some degree of under-

THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX

standing: understanding of what? Of the need to submit: to what! Not

simply to the will of God (not at any rate during the writing of the

great novels, in the J 86os or 7os) nor to the 'iron laws' of the sciences;

but to the permanent relationships of things,1 and the universal

texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found

by a kind of 'natural'-somewhat Aristotelian-knowledge. To do this

is, above all, to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and

what they cannot. How can this be known? Not by a specific inquiry

and discovery, but by an awareness, n'Jt necessarily explicit or conscious,

of certain general characteristics of human life and experience. And the

most important and most pervasive of these is the crucial line that

divides the 'surface' from the 'depths' -on the one hand the world of

perceptible, describable, analysable data, both physical and psychological, both 'external' and 'inner', both public and private, with which the sciences can deal, although they have in some regions-those

outside physics-made so little progress; and, on the other hand, the

order which, as it were, 'contains' and determines the structure of

experience, the framework in which it-that is, we and all that we

experience-must be conceived as being set, that which enters into

our habits of thought, action, feeling, our emotions, hopes, wishes,

our ways of talking, believing, reacting, being. We-sentient creatures

-are in part living in a world the constituents of which we can discover,

classify and act upon by rational, scientific, deliberately planned

methods; but in part (Tolstoy and Maistre, and many thinkers with

them, say much the larger part) we are immersed and submerged in a

medium that, precisely to the degree to which we inevitably take it for

granted as part of ourselves, we do not and cannot observe as if from

the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot

even be wholly aware of, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all

our experience, is itself too closely interwoven with all that we are

and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with

scientific detachment, as an object. It-the medium in which we aredetermines our most pennanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the

central and the peripheral, the subjective and the objective, of the

beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, preso:nt and

future, of one and many; hence neither these, nor any other explicitly

1 Alm01t in the senae in which tlW phrase is used by Montesquieu in the

opening sentence of De /'esprit des lois.

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

conceived categories o r concepts can b e applied to it-for it i s itself

but a vague name for the totality that includes these categories, these

concepts, the ultimate framework, the basic presuppositions wherewith we function. Nevertheless, though we cannot analyse the medium without some (impossible) vantage point outside it (for there is no

'outside'), yet some human beings are better aware-although they

cannot describe it-of the texture and direction of these 'submerged'

portions of their own and everyone else's lives; better aware of this

than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive

medium (the 'flow of life'), and are rightly called st�perficial; or else

try to apply to it instruments-scientific, metaphysical etc. -adapted

solely to objects above the surface, i.e. the relatively conscious,

manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in

their theories and humiliating failures in practice. Wisdom is ability

to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we actas we allow for the pervasiveness, say, of time or space, which characterises all our experience; and to discount, less or more consciously, the

'inevitable trends', the 'imponderables', the 'way things are going'. It

is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours

of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity

for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor

which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated;

an ability to be guided by rules of thumb-the 'immemorial wisdom'

said to reside in peasants and o�her 'simple folk' -where rules of

science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic

orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live.

Sometimes Tolstoy does speak as if science could in principle, if not

in practice, penetrate and conquer everything; and if it did, then we

should know the causes of all there is, and know we were not free,

but wholly determined -which is all that the wisest can ever know.

So, too, Maistre talks as if the school men knew more than we, through

their superior techniques: but what they knew was still, in some sense,

'the -facts' : the subject-matter of the sciences; St Thomas knew

incomparably more than Newton, and with more precision and more

certainty, but what he knew was of the same kind. But despite this

lip-service to the truth-finding capacities of natural science or theology,

these avowals remain purely formal : and a very different belief finds

expression in the positive doctrines of both Maistre and Tolstoy.

Aquinas is praised by Maistre not for being a better mathematician

than d' Alembert or Monge; Kutuzov's virtue does not, according to

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

Tolstoy, consist in his being a better, more scientific theorist of war

than Pfuel or Paulucci. These great men are wiser, not more knowledgeable; it is not their deductive or inductive reasoning that makes them masters; their vision is 'profounder', they see something the

others fail to see; they see the way the world goes, what goes with

what, and what never will be brought together; they see what can be

and what cannot; how men live and to what ends, what they do and

suffer, and how and why they act, and should act, thus and not otherwise. This 'seeing' purveys, in a sense, no fresh information about the universe; it is an awareness of the interplay of the imponderable with

the ponderable, of the 'shape' of things in general or of a specific

situation, or of a particular character, which is precisely what cannot

be deduced from, or even formulated in terms of, the laws of nature

demanded by scientific determinism. Whatever can be subsumed under

such laws scientists can and do deal with; that needs no 'wisdom';

and to deny science its rights because of the existence of this superior

'wisdom' is a wanton invasion of scientific territory, and a confusion

of categories. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying

the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere

trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of the reach of

science-the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be

sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the

proportion in them of 'submerged', uninspectable life is too high. The

insight that reveals the nature and structure of these worlds is not a

mere makeshift substitute, an empirical pis oller to which recourse is

had only so long as the relevant scientific techniques are insufficiently

refined; its business is altogether different: it does what no science

can claim to do; it distinguishes the real from the sham, the worth.!

while from the worthless, that which can be done or borne from

what cannot be; and does so without giving rational grounds for its

pronouncements, if only because 'rational' and 'irrational' are terms

that themselves acquire their meanings and uses in relation to-by

'growing out of' -it, and not vice versa. For what are the data of

such understanding if not the ultimate soil, the framework, the

atmosphere, the context, the medium (to use whatever metaphor is

most expressive) in which all our thoughts and acts are felt, valued,

judged, in the inevitable ways that they are? It is the ever present

sense of this framework-of this movement of events, or changing

pattern of characteristics-as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power (in the sense of 'power'

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i n which the progress of scientific knowledge has given u s power

over nature), that is at the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his

realism, his pessimism, and his (and Maistre's) contempt for the faith

placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense. It is

'there' -the framework, the foundation of everything-and the wise

man alone has a sense of it; Pierre gropes for it; Kutuzov feels it in

his bones; Karataev is at one with it. All Tolstoy's heroes attain to

at least intermittent glimpses of it-and this it is that makes all the

conventional explanations, the scientific, the historical, those of unreRective 'good sense', seem so hollow and, at their most pretentious, so shamefully false. Tolstoy himself, too, knows that the truth is

there, and not 'here' - not in the regions susceptible to observation,

discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time; but he has not, himself, seen it face to face; for

he has not, do what he might, a vision of the whole; he is not, he is

remote from being, a hedgehog; and what he sees is not the one, but,

always with an ever growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality,

with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all-penetrating lucidity

which maddens him, the many.

V I I

We are part of a larger scheme o f things than w e ca n understand. We

cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters

of other people can be described, by isolating them somewhat from the

historical 'Row' in which they have their being, and from the 'submerged', unfathomed, portions of themselves to which professional historians have, according to Tolstoy, paid so little heed; for we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it. For until and unless we do so (only

after much bitter suffering, if we are to trust Aeschylus and the Book

of Job), we shall protest and suffer in vain, and make sorry fools of

ourselves (as Napoleon did) into the bargain. This sense of the circumambient stream, defiance of whose nature through stupidity or overweening egotism will make our acts and thoughts self-defeating, is the vision of the unity of experience, the sense of history, the true

knowledge of reality, the belief in the incommunicable wisdom of

the sage (or the saint) which, mutatis mutandis, is common to Tolstoy

and Maistre. Their realism is of a similar sort: the natural enemy of

romanticism, sentimentalism and 'historicism' as much as of aggressive

THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX

'scientism'. Their purpose is not to distinguish the little that is known

or done from the limitless ocean of what, in principle, could or one

day would be known or done, whether by advance in the knowledge

of the natural sciences or of metaphysics or of the historical sciences,

or by a return to the past, or by some other method; what they seek

to establish are the eternal frontiers of our knowledge and power, to

demarcate them from what cannot in principle ever be known or

altered by men. According to Maistre our destiny lies in original sinin the fact that we are human- finite, fallible, vicious, vain-and that all our empirical knowledge (as opposed to the teachings of the Church)

is infected by error and monomania. According to Tolstoy all our

knowledge is necessarily empirical- there is no other-but it will never

conduct us to true understanding, but only to an accumulation of

arbitrarily abstracted bits and pieces of information; yet that seems to

him (as much as to any metaphysician of the Idealist school which he

despised) worthless beside, and unintelligible save in so far as it derives

from and points to, this inexpressible but very palpable kind of superior

understanding which alone is worth pursuing. Sometimes Tolstoy

comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about

a given human action, the more inevitable, determined it seems to us

to be; why?-because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred

without them-and as we go on removing in our imagination what

we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult

but impossible. Tolstoy's meaning is not obscure. We are what we

are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristicsphysical, psychological, social etc.- that it has; what we think, feel, do, is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible

alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination

and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what

might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits-limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives- 'might have beens'and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy's argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in which they occur,

the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined

by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not con-

"

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ccivable at all: some minds are more imaginative than others, but all

stop somewhere. The world is a system and a network: to conceive

of men as 'free' is to think of them as capable of having, at some

past juncture, acted in some fashion other than that in which they did

act; it is to think of what consequences would have come of such

unfulfilled possibilities and in what respects the world would have

been different, as a result, from the world as it now is. It is difficult

enough to do this in the case of artificial, purely deductive systems, as

for example in chess, where the permutations are finite in number,

and clear in type- having been arranged so by us, artificially-so that

the combinations are calculable. But if you apply this method to the

vague, rich texture of the real world, and try to work out the implications of this or that unrealised plan or unperformed action-the effect of it on the totality of later events-basing yourself on such knowledge

of causal laws, probabilities etc. as you have, you will find that the

greater the number of 'minute' causes you discriminate, the more

appalling becomes the task of 'deducing' any consequence of the

'unhinging' of each of these, one by one; for each of the consequences

affects the whole of the rest of the uncountable totality of events and

things; which unlike chess is not defined in terms of a finite, arbitrarily

chosen set of concepts and rules. And if, whether in real life or even

in chess, you begin to tamper with basic notions-continuity of space,

divisibility of time and the like-you will soon reach a stage in which

the symbols fail to function, your thoughts become confused and

paralysed. Consequendy the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their

connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer

and more exact the terms-or the categories-in which we conceive

and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less

'free' acts seem. To know dtese limits, both of imagination and,

ultimately, of thought itself, is to come &ce to face with the 'inexorable' unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere Oriental

fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German

materialists of the day, Buchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired

so deeply by the revolutionary 'nihilists' of Tolstoy's generation in

Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration.

It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But

its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a m.>nistic vision of life

on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a

hedgehog.

T H E H E D G E HO G AND T H E FOX

This is remarkably close to Maistre's dogmatic affirmations: we

must achieve an attitude of assent to the demands of history which are

the voice of God speaking through His servants and His divine

institutions, not made by human hands and not destructible by them.

We must attune ourselves to the true word of God, the inner 'go' of

things; but what it is in concrete cases, how we are to conduct our

private lives or public policies-of that we are told little by either critic

of optimistic liberalism. Nor can we expect to be told. For the positive

vision escapes them. Tolstoy's language-and Maistre's r.o less-is

adapted to the opposite activity. It is in analysing, identifying sharply,

marking differences, isolating concrete examples, piercing to the heart

of each individual entity pn- u, that Tolstoy rises to the full height

of his genius; and similarly Maistre achieves his brilliant effects by

pinning down and offering for public pillory-by a montage sur

/'lpinglt-the absurdities committed by his opponents. They are acute

observers of the varieties of experience: every attempt to represent

these falsely, or to offer ddusive explanations of them, they detect

immediately and deride savagely. Yet they both know that the full

truth-the ultimate basis of the correlation of all the ingredients of

the universe with one another�the context in which alone anything

that they, or anyone else, can say can ever be true or false, trivial or

important-that resides in a synoptic vision which, because they do

not possess it, they cannot express. What is it that Pierre has learnt, of

which Princess Marie's marriage is an acceptance, that Prince Andrey

all his life pursued with such agony? Like Augustine, Tolstoy can

only say what it is not; His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can

only,attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts

to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not-namely

all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds

to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like

Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it

his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that

it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is

not-above all, ni.t anything that art, or science or civilisation or

rational criticism, can achieve. And so too Joseph de Maistre. He is

the Voltaire of reaction. Every new doctrine since the ages of faith is

tom to shreds with ferocious skill and malice. The pretenders are

exposed and struck down one by one; the armoury of weapons against

liberal and humanitarian doctrines is the most effective ever assembled.

But the throne remains vacant, the positive doctrine is too uncon-

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vincing. Maistre sighs for the Dark Ages, but no sooner are plans

for the undoing of the French Revolution-a return to the status 'luo

antt'-suggested by his fellow emigres, than he denounces them as

childish nonsense-an attempt to behave as if what has occurred and

changed us all irretrievably had never been. To try to reverse the

Revolution, he wrote, was as if one had been invited to drain the

Lake of Geneva by bottling its waters in a wine cellar.

There is no kinship between him and those who really did believe

in the possibility of some kind of return-nco-medievalists from

Wackenroder and Gorres and Cobbett to G. K. Chesterton and

Slavophils and Distributists and pre-Raphaelites and other nostalgic

romantics; for he believed, as Tolstoy also did, in the exact opposite :

in the 'inexorable' power of the present moment : in our inability to do

away with the sum of conditions which cumulatively determine our

basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.

The quarrel between these rival types of knowledge-that which

results from methodical inquiry, and the more impalpable kind that

consists in the 'sense of reality', in 'wisdom' -is very old. And the

claims of both have generally been recognised to have some validity:

the bitterest clashes have been concerned with the precise line which

marks the frontier between their territories. Those who made large

claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their

adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favour of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their

opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd

claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to

understand what they are; when the results of their labours, even

when they are not nugatory, tend to take unpredicted, often catastrophic directions-and all' this because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are

always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural

science. Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable,

not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world

whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each

context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically)

best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to dis-

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tinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study

and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the

most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features

of our world, which, if anything, are over-familiar, so that their

'inexorable' pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly

noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an

object of study. This is the distinction that permeates the thought of

Pascal and Blake, Rousseau and Schelling, Goethe and Coleridge,

Chateaubriand and Carlyle; of all those who speak of the, reasons of

the heart, or of men's moral or spiritual nature, of sublimity and

depth, of the 'profounder' insight of poets and prophets, of special

kinds of understanding, of inwardly comprehending, or being at one

with, the world. To these latter thinkers both Tolstoy and Maistre

belong. Tolstoy blames everything on our ignorance of empirical

causes, and. Maistre on the abandonment of Thomist logic or the

theology of the Catholic Church. But these avowed professions are

belied by the tone and content of what in fact the two great critics

say. Both stress, over and over again, the contrast between the 'inner'

and the 'outer', the 'surface' which alone is lighted by the rays of

science and of reason, and the 'depths'-'the real life lived by men'.

For Maistre, as later for Barres, true knowledge- wisdom-lies in an

understanding of, and communion with, Ia terre et les morts (what

has this to do with Thomist logic?)- the great unalterable movement

created by the links between the dead and the living and the yet

unborn and the land on which they live; and it is this, perhaps, or

something akin to it, that, in their respective fashions, Burke and

Taine, and their many imitators, have attempted to convey. As for

Tolstoy, to him such mystical conservatism was peculiarly detestable,

since it seemed to him to evade the central question by merely restating

it, concealed in a cloud of pompous rhetoric, as the answer. Yet he,

too, in the end, presents us with the vision, dimly discerned by K utuzov

and by Pierre, of Russia in her vastness, and what she could and what

she could not do or suffer, and how and when-all of which Napoleon

and his advisers (who knew a great deal but not of what was relevant

to the issue) did not perceive; and so (although their knowledge of

history and science and minute causes was perhaps greater than

Kutuzov's or Pierre's) were led duly to their doom. Maistre's paeans

to the superior science of the great Christian soldiers of the past and

Tolstoy's lamentations about our scientific ignorance should not

mislead anyone as to the nature of what they are in fact defending:

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awareness of the 'deep currents', the raisons de ctZur, which they did

not indeed themselves know by direct experience; but beside which,

they were convinced, the devices of science were but a snare and a

delusion.

Despite their deep dissimilarity and indeed violent opposition to

one another, Tolstoy's sceptical realism and Maistre's dogmatic

authoritarianism are blood brothers. For both spring from an agonised

belief in a single, serene vision, in which all problems are resolved, all

doubts stilled, peace and understanding finally achieved. Deprived of

this vision, they devoted all their formidable resollrces from their

very different, and indeed often incompatible, positions, to the elimination of all possible adversaries and critics of it. The faiths for whose mere abstract possibility they fought were not, indeed, identical. It is

the predicament in which they found themselves and that caused them

to dedicate their strength to the lifelong task of destruction, it is their

common enemies and the strong likeness between their temperaments

that make them odd but unmistakable allies in a war which they were

both conscious of fighting until their dying day.

V I I I

Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were-one the apostle of the gospel

that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims

of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering-they were united

by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both

by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto

differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world,

observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle

devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the

superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat,

however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a

condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons

of criticism, with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were overgenerously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from nonnal intellectual proces5es

to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps,

offering a path to peace and salvation. Maistre began as a moderate

liberal and ended by pulverising the new nineteenth-century world

from the solitary citadel of his own variety of ultramontane Catholicism.

8o

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

Tolstoy began with a view of human life and history which contradicted all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations, and which, in consequence, he could scarcely be said to have embraced in the sense

of practising it, either as a writer or as a man. From this, in his old

age, he passed into a form of life in which he tried to resolve the

glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events,

and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe, by behaving, in

the end, as if factual questions of this kind were not the fundamental

issues at all, only the trivial preoccupations of an idle, ill-conducted

life, while the real questions were quite different. But it was of no

use: the Muse cannot be cheated. Tolstoy was the least superficial

of men : he could not swim with the tide without being drawn

irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below;

and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that;

he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his

appalling, destructive, sense of what was false frustrated this final

effort at self-deception as it ciid all the earlier ones; and he died in

agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and

his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can

neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there

is with what there ought to be. Tolstoy's sense of reality was until

the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which

he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect

shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind

and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud

and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold

and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented

and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers,

by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly

isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old

man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.

Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

'Human life is a great social duty,' (said Louis Blanc]:

'man must constantly sacrifice himself for society.'

'Why?' I asked suddenly.

'How do you mean "Why?"- but surely the whole

purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'

'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices

and nobody enjoys himself.'

'You are playing with words.'

'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied,

laughing. Alexander Herzen, 'My Past and Thoughts'1

Since the age of thirteen . . . I have served one idea,

marched under one banner-war against all imposed

authority-against every kind of deprivation of freedom,

in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.

I should like to go on with my little guerilla war-like a

real Cossack-11:sj tigtflt F1111s1-as the Germans say.

Aleunder Herzen, letter to Mazzini1

OF all the Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century,

Herzen and Bakunin remain the most arresting. They were divided

by many differences both of doctrine and of temperament, but they

were at one in placing the ideal of individual liberty at the centre of

their thought and action. Both dedicated their lives to rebellion against

every form of oppression, social and political, public and private, open

and concealed; but the very multiplicity of their gifts has tended to

obscure the relative value of their ideas on this crucial topic.

Bakunin was a gifted journalist, whereas Herzen was a writer of

1 So6r1111it so(Aiuflii 11 1rid1J111i lomdA (Co/JtmJ Wri1i11gs ;, TAirty

l'olumtr) (Moacow, 1 954-65; inde:r:es 1966), val. XI, p. 48. All subsequent

references to Herzen's works are to this edition, by volume and page, thus:

XI 48.

1 To G. Mazzini, 13 September 1 850.

8:1

H E RZEN AN D BAK U N IN ON L I BERTY

genius, whose autobiography remains one of the great masterpieces

of Russian prose. As a publicist he had no equal in his century. He

possessed a singular combination of fiery imagination, capacity for

meticulous observation, moral passion, and intellectual gaiety, with a

talent for writing in a manner at once pungent and distinguished,

ironical and incandescent, brilliantly entertaining and at times rising

to great nobility of feeling and expression. What Mazzini did for the

Italians, Herzen did for his countrymen: he created, almost singlehanded, the tradition and the 'ideology' of systematic revolutionary agitation, and thereby founded the revolutionary movement in Russia.

Bakunin's literary endowment was more limited, but he exercised a

personal fascination unequalled even in that heroic age of popular

tribunes, and left behind him a tradition of political conspiracy which

has played a major part in the great upheavals of our own century.

Yet these very achievements, which have earned the two friends and

companions in arms their claim to immortality, serve to conceal their

respective importance as political and social thinkers. For whereas

Bakunin, for all his marvellous eloquence, his lucid, clever, vigorous,

at times devastating, critical power, seldom says anything which is

precise, or profound, or authentic-in any sense personally 'lived

through'- Herzen, despite his brilliance, his careless spontaneity, his

notorious 'pyrotechnics', expresses bold and original ideas, and is a

political (and consequently a moral) thinker of the first importance.

To classify his views with those of Bakunin as forms of semi-anarchistic

'populism', or with those of Proudhon or Rodbertus or Chernyshevsky

as yet another variant of early socialism with an agrarian bias, is to

leave out his most arresting contribution to political theory. This

injustice deserves to be remedied. Herzen's basic political ideas are

unique not merely by Russian, but by European standards. Russia is

not so rich in first-rate thinkers that she can afford to ignore one of

the three moral preachers of genius born upon her soil.

I I

Alexander Herzen grew up in a world dominated by French and

German historical romanticism. The failure of the great French

Revolution had discredited the optimistic naturalism of the eighteenth

century as deeply as the Russian Revolution of our own day weakened

the prestige of Victorian liberalism. The central notion of eighteenthcentury enlightenment was the belief that the principal causes of human misery, injustice, and oppression lay in men's ignorance and

,,

R U S S IAN TH I N K E R S

folly. Accurate knowledge of the laws governing the physical world,

once and for all discovered and formulated by the divine Newton,

would enable men in due course to dominate nature; by understanding

and adjusting themselves to the unalterable causal laws of nature they

would live as well and as happily as it is possible to live in the world

as it is; at any rate, they would avoid the pains and disharmonies due

to vain and ignorant efforts to oppose or circumvent such laws. Some

thought that the world as explained by Newton was what it was dt

facto, for no discoverable reason-an ultimate, unexplained reality.

Others believed they could discover a rational plan-a 'natural' or

divine Providence, governed by an ultimate purpose for which all

creation strove; so that man, by submitting to it, was not bowing to

blind necessity, but consciously recognising the part which he played

in a coherent, intelligible, and thereby justified process. But whether

the N ewtonian scheme was taken as a mere description or as a theodicy,

it was the ideal paradigm of all explanation; it remained for the genius

of Locke to point a way whereby the moral and spiritual worlds

could at last also be set i n order and explained by the application of

the selfsame principles. If the natural sciences enabled men to shape

the material world to their desire, the moral sciences would enable

them so to regulate their conduct as to avoid for. ever discord between

beliefs and facts, and so end all evil, stupidity and frustration. If

philosophers (that is, scientists), both natural and moral, were put in

charge of the world, instead of kings, noblemen, priests, and their

dupes and factotums, universal happiness could in principle be achieved.

The consequences of the French Revolution broke the spell of

these ideas. Among the doctrines which sought to explain what it

was that must have gone wrong, German romanticism, both in its

subjective-mystical and its nationalist forms, and in particular the

Hegelian movement, acquired a dominant position. This is not the

place to examine it in detail; suffice it to say that it retained the dogma

that the world obeyed intelligible laws; that progress was possible,

according to some inevitable plan, and identical with the development

of 'spiritual' forces; that experts could discover these laws and teach

understanding of the:n to others. For the followers of Hegel the

gravest blunder that had been made by the French materialists lay in

supposing that these laws were mechanical, that the univene was

composed of isolable bits and pieces, of molecules, or atoms, or cells,

and that everything could be explained and predicted in terms of the

movement of bodies in space. Men were not mere collocations of

8+

H E RZEN AND BAKUNIN ON L I B E RTY

bits of matter; they were souls or spirits obeying unique and intricate

laws of their own. Nor were human societies mere collocations of

individuals: they too possessed inner structures analogous to the

psychical organisation of individual souls, and pursued goals of which

the individuals who composed them might, in varying degrees, be

unconscious. Knowledge was, indeed, liberating. Only people who

knew why everything was as it was, and acted as it did, and why it

was irrational for it to be or do anything else, could themselves be

wholly rational : that is, would cooperate with the universe willingly,

and not try to beat their heads in vain against the unyielding 'logic of

the facts'. The only goals which were attainable were those embedded

in the pattern of historical development; these alone were rational

because the pattern was rational ; human failure was a symptom of

irrationality, of misunderstanding of what the times demanded, of

what the next stage of the progress of reason must be; and valuesthe good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly-were what a rational being would strive for at a specific stage

of its growth as part of the rational pattern. To deplore the inevitable

because it was cruel or unjust, to complain of what must be, was to

reject rational answers to the problems of what to do, how to live. To

oppose the stream was to commit suicide, which was mere madness.

According to this view, the good, the noble, the just, the strong, the

inevitable, the rational, were 'ultimately' one; conflict between them

was ruled out, logically, a priori. Concerning the nature of the pattern

there might be differences; Herder saw it in the development of the

cultures of different tribes and races; Hegel in the development of

the national state. Saint-Simon saw a broader pattern of a single western

civilisation, and distinguished in it the dominant role of technological

evolution and the conflicts of economically conditioned classes, and

within these the crucial influence of exceptional individuals-of men

of moral, intellectual, or anistic genius. Mazzini and Michelet saw

it in terms of the inner spirit of each people seeking to assen the

principles of their common humanity, each in its own fashion, against

individual oppression or blind nature. Marx conceived it in terms of

the history of the struggle of classes created and determined by growth

of the forces of material production. Politico-religious thinkers in

Germany and France saw it as historia sacra, the progress of fallen

man struggling toward union with God-the final theocracy-the

submission of secular forces to the reign of God on eanh.

There were many variants of these central doctrines, some Hegelian,

as

R U SSIAN T H INKERS

some mystical, some going back to eighteenth-century naturalism;

furieus battles were fought, heresies attacked, recalcitrants crushed.

What they all had in common was the belief, firsdy, that the universe

obeys laws and displays a pattern, whether intelligible to reason, or

empirically discoverable, or mystically revealed; secondly, that men

are elements in wholes larger and stronger than themselves, so that

the behaviour of individuals can be explained in terms of such wholes,

and not vice versa; thirdly, that answers to the questions of what

should be done are deducible from knowledge of the goals of the

objective process of history in which men are willy-nilly involved,

and must be identical for all those who truly know- for all rational

beings; fourthly, that nothing can be vicious or cruel or stupid or

ugly that is a means to the fulfilment of the objectively given cosmic

purpose-it cannot, at least, be so 'ultimately', or 'in the last analysis'

(however it might look on the face of it)-and conversely, that everything that opposes the great purpose, is so. Opinions might vary as to whether such goals were inevitable-and progress therefore automatic;

or whether, on the contrary, men were free to choose to realise them

or to abandon them (to their own inevitable doom). But all were

agreed that objective ends of universal validity could be found, and

that they were the sole proper ends of all social, political, and personal

activity; for otherwise the world could not be regarded as a 'cosmos'

with real laws and 'objective' demands; all beliefs, all values, might

turn out merely relative, merely subjective, the plaything of whims

and accidents, unjustified and unjustifiable, which was unthinkable.

Against this great despotic vision, the intellectual glory of the age,

rev:ealed, worshipped, and embellished with countless images and

_.Rowers by the metaphysical genius of Germany, and acclaimed by the

profoundest and most admired thinkers of France, Italy, and Russia,

Herzen rebelled violently. He rejected its foundations and denounced

its conclusions, not merely because it seemed to him (as it had to his

friend Belinsky) morally revolting; but also because he thought it

intellectually specious and aesthetically tawdry, and an attempt to

force nature into a straitjacket of the poverty-stricken imagination of

German philistines and pedants. In Ltttn-s from Franct and Italy,

From the Othn- Short, Lttttrs to an Old Comrade, in Opm Lettn-s to

Michelet, W. Linton, Mazzini, and, of course, throughout My Past and

Thoughts, he enunciated his own ethical and philosophical beliefs. Of

these, the most important were: that nature obeys no plan, that history

follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula can, in principle,

86

H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions

are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age

has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty-of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area

of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in

the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the

great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history,

or humanity, or progress, still less the state or the Church or the

proletariat-great names invoked to justify acts of detestable cruelty

and despotism, magic formulas designed to stifie the voices of human

feeling and conscience. This liberal attitude had an affinity with the

thin but not yet dead tradition of western libertarianism, of which

elements persisted even in Germany- in Kant, in Wilhelm von

Humboldt, in the early works of Schiller and of Fichte-surviving in

France and French Switzerland among the Id�ologues and in the

views of Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville and Sismondi; and remained

a hardy growth in England among the utilitarian radicals.

Like the early liberals of western Europe, Herzen delighted in

independence, variety, the free play of individual temperament. He

desired the richest possible development of personal characteristics,

valued spontaneity, directness, distinction, pride, 'paS.sion, sincerity, the

style and colour of free individuals; he detested conformism, cowardice,

submission to the tyranny of brute force or pressure of opinion,

arbitrary violence, and anxious submissiveness; he hated the worship

of power, blind reverence for the past, for institutions, for mysteries

or myths; the humiliation of the weak by the strong, sectarianism,

philistinism, the resentment and envy of majorities, the brutal arrogance of minorities. He desired social justice, economic efficiency, political stability, but these must always remain secondary to the

need for protecting human dignity, the upholding of civilised values,

the protection of individuals from aggression, the preservation of

sensibility and genius from individual or institutional bullying. Any

society which, for whatever reason, failed to prevent such invasions

of liberty, and opened the door to the possibility of insult by one side,

and grovelling by the other, he condemned outright and rejected with

all its works-all the social or economic advantages which it might,

quite genuinely, offer. He rejected it with the same moral fury as that

with which I van Karamazov spurned the promise of eternal happiness

bought at the cost of the torture of one innocent child; but the

87

R U SS IAN T H I NK E R S

arguments which Herzen employed i n defence of his pOsition, and

the description of the enemy whom he picked out for pillory and

destruction, were set forth in language which both in tone and substance had little in common with either the theological or the liberal eloquence of his age.

As an acute and prophetic observer of his times he is comparable,

perhaps, to Marx and Tocqueville; as a moralist he is more interesting

and original than either.

I I I

Man, it is commonly asserted, desires liberty. Moreover, human beings

are said to have rights, in virtue of which they claim a certain degree

of freedom of action. These formulas taken by themselves strike

Herzen as hollow. They must be given some concrete meaning, but

even then-if they are taken as hypotheses about what people actually

believe- they are untrue; not borne out by history; for the masses have

seldom desired freedom :

The masses want to stay the hand which impudently snatches from

them the bread which they have earned . . . They are indifferent

to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority.

They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are

offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand

equality of oppression . . . they want a social government to rule

for their benefit, and not, like the present one, against it. But to

govern themselves doesn't enter their heads.1

On this topic there has been altogether too much 'romanticism for the

heart' and 'idealism for the mind'2- too much craving for verbal

magic, too much desire to substitute words for things. With the result

that bloody struggles have been fought and many innocent human

beings slaughtered and the most horrible crimes condoned in the name

of empty abstractions:

There is no nation in the world . . . which has shed so much blood

for freedom as the French, and there is no people which understands it less, seeks to realise it less . . . on the streets, in the courts, in their homes . . . The French are the most abstract and religious

people in the world; the fanaticism of ideas with them goes hand in

hand with lack of respect for persons, with contempt for their

1 'From the Other Shore': VI 1 24-.

I ibid.: VI 1 2].

88

H E R Z E N AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

neighbours-the French turn everything into an idol, and then woe

to him who does not bow the knee to the idol of the day. Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom and without a thought drag you to jail if you don't agree with their opinions . . . The despotic sa/us

populi and the bloody and inquisitorial pereat mundus et fiat justitia

are engraved equally in the consciousness of royalists and democrats

. . . read George Sand, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Micheret, you will meet everywhere Christianity and romanticism adapted to our own morality; everywhere dualism, abstraction, abstract

duty, enforced virtues and official and rhetorical morality without

any relation to real life.1

Ultimately, Herzen goes on to say, this is heartless frivolity, the

sacrifice of human beings to mere words which inRame the passions,

and which, upon being pressed for their meaning, turn out to refer

to nothing, a kind of political gaminerie which 'excited and fascinated

Europe', but also plunged it into inhuman and unnecessary slaughter.

'Dualism' is for Herzen a confusion of words with facts, the construction of theories employing abstract terms which are not founded in discovered real needs, of political programmes deduced from abstract

principles unrelated to real situations. These formulas grow into

terrible weapons in the hands of fanatical doctrinaires who seek to

bind them upon human beings, if need be, by violent vivisection, for

the sake of some absolute ideal, for which the sanction lies in some

uncriticised and uncriticisable vision- metaphysical, religious, aesthetic,

at any rate, unconcerned with the actual needs of actual persons -in

the name of which the revolutionary leaders kill and torture with a

quiet conscience, because they know that this and this alone is- must

be-the solution to all social and political and personal ills. And he

develops this thesis along lines made familiar to us by Tocqueville

and other critics of democracy, by pointing out that the masses detest

talent, wish everyone to think as they do, and are bitterly suspicious

of independence of thought and conduct:

The submission of the individual to society-to the people-to

humanity- to the idea-is a continuation of human sacrifice . . . the

crucifixion of the innocent for the guilty . . . The individual who

is the true, real monad of society, has always been sacrificed to some

general concept, some collective noun, some banner or other. What

the purpose of . . . the sacrifice was . . . was never so much as asked. 2

1 'Letters from France and Italy', tenth letter: V l7 s-6.

I 'From the Other Shore': VI u s-6.

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

Since these abstractions-history, progress, the safety of the people,

social equality-have all been cruel altars upon which innocents have

been offered up without a qualm, they are deserving of notice. Herzen

examines them in turn.

If history has an inexorable direction, a rational structure, and a

purpose (perhaps a beneficial one), we must adjust ourselves to it or

perish. But what is this rational purpose? Herzen cannot discern it;

he sees no sense in history, only the story of 'hereditary, chronic

madness':

It seems unnecessary to cite examples, there are millions of them.

Open any history you like and what is striking . . . is that instead

of real interests everything is governed by imaginary interests,

fantasies. Look at the kind of causes in which blood is shed, in

which people bear extreme sufferings; look at what is praised and

what is blamed, and you will be convinced of a truth which at first

seems sad-of a truth which on second thoughts is full of comfort,

that all this is the result of a deranged intellect. Wherever you look

in the ancient world, you will find madness almost as widespread

as it is in our own. Here is Curti us throwing himself into a pit to

save the city. There a father is sacrificing his daughter to obtain a

fair wind, and he has found an old idiot to slaughter the poor girl

for him, and this lunatic has not been locked up, has not been taken

to a madhouse, but has been recognised as the high priest. Here

the King of Persia orders the sea to be flogged, and understands the

absurdity of his act as little as his enemies the Athenians, who

wanted to cure the intellect and the understanding of human

beings with hemlock. What frightful fever was it that made the

emperors persecute Christianity? . . .

And after the Christians were torn and tortured by wild beasts,

they themselves, in their turn, began to persecute and torture

one another more furiously than they themselves had been persecuted. How many innocent Germans and Frenchmen perished just so, for no reason at all, while their demented judges thought

they were merely doing their duty, and slept peacefully not many.

steps from the place where the heretics were being roasted to death.1

'History is the autobiography of a madman.'1 This might have been

written with equal bitterness by Voltaire and by Tolstoy. The purpose

of history? We do not make history and are not responsible for it. If

1 'Doctor Krupov': IV z63-4.

--1-i'61d.:

-

IV z64.

90

H E RZEN AND BAKUN I N ON LIBERTY

history is a tale told by an idiot. it is certainly criminal to justify the

oppression and cruelty. the imposition of one's arbitrary will upon

many thousands of human beings, in the name of hollow abstractionsthe 'demands' of' history' or of'historical destiny'. of'national security'.

of 'the logic of the facts'. 'Salus populi suprema lex. pereat mundus et

fiat justitia have about them a strong smell of burnt bodies, blood,

inquisition. torture, and generally of"the triumph of order". '1 Abstractions. apart from their evil consequences, are a mere attempt to evade facts which do not fit into our preconceived schema.

A man looks at something freely only when he does not bend it to

his theory, and does not himself bend before it; reverence before it,

not free but enforced, limits a man, narrows his freedom; something in talking of which one is not allowed to smile without blasphemy . . . is a fetish, a man is crushed by it, he is frightened of

confounding it with ordinary life.1

It becomes an icon, an object of blind, uncomprehending woBhip, and

so a mystery justifying excessive crimes. And in the same vein:

The world will not know liberty until all that is religious.

political, is transformed into something simple "'nd human, is made

susceptible to criticism and denial. Logic when it comes of age

detests canonised truths . . . it thinks nothing sacrosanct, and if

the republic arrogates to itself the same rights as the monarchy, it

will despise it as much, nay, more . . . It is not enough to despise

the crown-one must not be filled with awe before the Phrygian

Cap; it is not enough not to consider lhe·majestl a crime: one must

look on sa/us populi as being one. a

And he adds that patriotism-to sacrifice oneself for one's country-is

doubtless noble; but it is better still if one survives together with one's

country. So much for 'history'. Human beings 'will be cured of [such]

idealism as they have been of other historical diseases-chivalry,

Catholicism, Protestantism'."

1 'From the Other Shore': VI 140.

t 'Letters from France and Italy', lifth letter: V 89. See also the remarkable

analysis of the universal desire to evade intellectual respJnsibility by the

creation of idols and the transgression of the Second Commandment in 'New

Variations on Old Themes' (II 86-102), which originally appeared in

SOPrement�il.

a 'From the Other Shore': VI 46.

" ibid.: VI 3 5·

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

Then there are those who speak of 'progress', and are prepared to

sacrifice the present to the future, to make men suffer today in order

that their remote descendants might be happy; and condone brutal

crimes and the degradation of human beings, because these are the

indispensable means toward some guaranteed future felicity. For this

attitude-shared equally by reactionary Hegelians and revolutionary

communists, speculative utilitarians and ultramontane zealots, and

indeed all who justify repellent means in the name of noble, but distant,

ends- Herzen reserves his most violent contempt and ridicule. To it

he devotes the best pages of From the Other Shore-his political

profession de foi, written as a lament for the broken illusions of

1 8 ... 8.

If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this

Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding

them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and

doomed multitudes, shouting 'morituri te salutant', can only give

the . . . mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful

on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive

today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some

day to dance on . . . or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their

knees in mud, drag a barge . . . with the humble words 'progress

in the future' upon its flag? . . . a goal which is infinitely remote is

no goal, only . . . a deception; a goal must be closer-at the very

least the labourer's wage, or pleasure in work performed. Each

epoch, each generation, each life has had, has, its own fullness; and

m route new demands grow, new experiences, new methods . . .

The end of each generation is itself. Not only does Nature never

make one generation the means for the attainment of some future

goal, but she doesn't concern herself with the future at all; like

Cleopatra, she is ready to dissolve the pearl in wine for a moment's

pleasure • . . 1

. . . If humanity marched straight towards some result, there

would be no history, only logic . . . reason develops slowly, painfully,

it does not exist in nature, nor outside natu:-e . . . one has to arrange

life with it as best one can, because there is no libretto. If history

followed a set libretto it would lose all interest, become unnecessary,

boring, ludicrous . . . great men would be so many heroes strutting

on a stage • • • History is all improvisation, all will, all extemporethere are no frontiers, no itineraries. Predicaments occur; sacred discontent; the fire of life; and the endless challenge to the fighters

1 ibid.: VI H-S·

HERZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY

to try their strength, to go where they will, where there is a road;

and where there is none, genius will blast a path.1

Herz.en goes on to say that processes in history or nature may repeat

themselves for millions of years; or·stop suddenly; the tail of a comet

may touch our planet and extinguish all life upon it; and this would

be the finale of history. But nothing follows from this, it carries no

moral with it. There is no guarantee that things will happen in one

way rather than another. The death of a single human being is no

less absurd and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race;

it is a mystery that we accept, and with which there is no need to

frighten children.

Nature is not a smooth, teleological development, certainly not a

development designed for human happiness or the fulfilment of social

justice. Nature is for Herz.en a mass of potentialities which develop in

accordance with no intelligible plan. Some develop, some perish; in

favourable conditions they may be realised, but they may deviate,

collapse, die. This leads some men to cynicism and despair. Is human

life an endless cycle of growth and recession, achievement and collapse?

Is there no purpose in it all? Is human effort bound to end in ruin, to

be followed by a new beginning as foredoomed to failure as its predecessors? This is a misunderstanding of reality. Why should nature be conceived as a utilitarian instrument designed for man's progress

or happiness? Why should utility-the fulfilment of purposes-be

demanded of the infinitely rich, infinitely generous cosmic process?

Is there not a profound vulgarity in asking of what use its marvellous

colour, its exquisite scent is to the plant, or what its purpose can be

when it is doomed to perish so soon? Nature is infinitely and recklessly

fertile-'she goes . to extreme limits . . . until she reaches the outer

frontier of all possible development-death -which cools her ardour

and checks the excess of her poetic fancy, her unbridled creative

passion.'2 Why should nature be expected to follow our dreary categories? What right have we to insist that history is meaningless unless it obeys the patterns we impose upon it, pursues our goals, our transient,

pedestrian ideals? History is an improvisation, it ' "simultaneously

knocks upon a thousand doors, . . . doors which may open . . . who

knows?" "Baltic ones, perhaps-and then Russia will pour over

Europe?" "Possibly." '3 Everything in nature, in history, is what it is,

and its own end. The present is its own fulfilment, it does not exist

1 ibid.: VI 36.

I ibid.: VI 31·

1 ibid.: V I 3z.

93

R U SS IAN TH INKERS

for the sake of some unknown future. If everything existed for the

sake of something else, every fact, event, creature would be a means

to something beyond itself in some cosmic plan. Or are we only

puppets, pulled by invisible strings, victims of mysterious forces in a

cosmic libretto? Is this what we mean by moral freedom? Is the

culmination of a process eo ipso its purpose? Is old age the purpose of

youth, merely because this is the order of human growth? Is the

purpose of life death?

Why does a singer sing? Merely in order that, when he has stopped

singing, his song might be �emembered, so that �he pleasure that his

song has given may awaken a longing for that which cannot be

recovered? No. This is a false and purblind and shallow view of life.

The purpose of the singer is the song. And the purpose of life is to

live it.

Everything passes, but what passes may reward the pilgrim for his

sufferings. Gt'ethe has told us that there is no insurance, no security,

man must be content with the present; but he is not; he rejects beauty

and fulfilment because he must own the future too. This is Herz.en's

answer to all those who like Mazzini or Kossuth, or the socialists

or the communists, called for supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the

sake of civilisation, or equality, or justice, or humanity, if not in the

present, then in the future. But this is 'idealism', metaphysical

'dualism', secular eschatology. The purpose oflife is itself, the purpose

of the struggle for liberty is the liberty here, today, ofliving individuals,

each with his own individual ends, for the sake of which they move

and fight and suffer, ends which are sacred to them; to crush their

freedom, stop their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some

ineffable felicity of the future, is blind, because that future is always

too uncertain, and vicious, because it outrages the only moral values

we know, tramples on real human lives and needs, and in the name

of what? Of freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,

mystical sounds, abstractions. Why is personal liberty worth pursuing?

Only for what it is in itself, because it is what it is, not because the

majority desires freedom. Men in general do not seek freedom, despite

Rousseau's celebrated exclamation that they are born free; that,

remarks Herz.en (echoing Joseph de Maistre),is as if you were to say

' Fish were born to fty, yet everywhere they swim.'1 lchthyophils may

seek to prove that fish are 'by nature' made to fty; but they are not.

1 ibid.: VI 94·

H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LI BERTY

And most people do not like liberators; they would rather continue

in the ancient ruts, and bear the ancient yokes, than take the immense

risks of building a new life. They prefer (Herzen repeats again and

again) even the hideous cost of the present, muttering that modern

life is at any rate better than feudalism and barbarism. 'The people'

do not desire liberty, only civilised individuals do; for the desire for

freedom is bound up with civilisation. The value of freedom, like

that of civilisation or education-none of which is 'natural' or obtainable without great effort-consists in the fact that without it the individual personality cannot realise all its potentialities-cannot live,

act, enjoy, create in the illimitable fashions which every moment of

history affords, and which differ in unfathomable ways from every

other moment of history, and are wholly incommensurable with them.

Man 'wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the

unconscious midwife of the future'.1 He wants to live in his own day.

His morality cannot be derived from the laws of history (which do

not exist) nor from the objective goals of human progress (there are

none such -they change with changing circumstances and persons).

Moral ends are what people want for their own sake. 'The truly free

man creates his own morality.'2

This denunciation of general moral rules- without a trace of

Byronic or Nietzschean hyperbole-is a doctrine not heard often in

the nineteenth century; indeed, in its full extent, not until well into

our own. It hits both right and left: against the romantic historians,

against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant; against utilitarians

and against supermen; against Tolstoy, and against the religion of

art, against 'scientific' ethics, and all the churches; it is empirical

and naturalistic, recognises absolute values as well as change, and is

overawed neither by evolution nor socialism. And it is original to an

arresting degree.

If existing political parties are to be condemned, it is not, Herzen

declares, because they do not satisfy the wishes of the majority, for

the majority, in any case, prefer slavery to freedom, and the liberation

of those who inwardly still remain slaves always leads to barbarism

and anarchy: 'to dismantle the Bastille stone by stone will not of

itself make free men out of the prisoners'.3 'The fatal error [of the

1 'Letter on the Freedom of the Will' (to his son Alexander): XX 4-37-B.

z 'From the Other Shore': VI I 3 I .

3 ibid.: VI :z9.

95

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

French radicals i n 1 848] is . • . to have tried to free others before they

were themselves liberated . . . They want, without altering the walls

[of the prison], to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail

could be used for a free existence.'1 Economic justice is certainly not

enough : and this is ignored, to their own doom, by the socialist 'sects'.

As for democracy, it can well be a 'razor' with which an immature

people-like France with its universal suffrage in 1 848-nearly cut its

own throat;2 to try to remedy this by a dictatorship ('Petrograndism')

leads to even more violent suppression. Gracchus Babeuf, who was

disappointed by the results of the French Revolution, proclaimed the

religion of equality-'the equality of penal servitude'.3 As for the

communists of our own day, what is it they offer us? The 'forced

labour of communism' of Cabet? The 'organisation of labour in

ancient Egypt a Ia Louis Blanc'?' The neatly laid out little phalansteries of Fourier, in which a free man cannot breathe-in which one side of life is permanently repressed for the benefit of others?& Communism is merely a levelling movement, the despotism of frenzied mobs, of Committees of Public Safety invoking the security of the

people-always a monstrous slogan, as vile as the enemy they seek to

overthrow. Barbarism is abominable whichever side it comes from:

'Who will finish us off, put an end to it all? The senile barbarism of

the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism? A blood-stained

sabre or the red Rag?'8 It is true that liberals are feeble, unrealistic,

and cowardly, and have no undetstanding of the needs of the poor

and the weak, of the new proletarian class which is rising; it is true

that the conservatives have shown themselves brutal, stupid, mean,

and despotic-although let it be remembered that priests and landowners are usually closer to the masses and understand their needs better than liberal intellectuals, even if their own intentions are less

benevolent or honest. It is true that Slavophils are mere escapists,

defenders of an empty throne, condoning a bad present in the name

of an imaginary past. These men follow brutal and selfish instincts,

or empty formulas. But the unbridled democracy of the present is no

1 ibid.: VI s • .

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 584.

3 ibid.: XX 578.

4 'From the Other Shore': VI 472.

& 'To an Old Comrade': XX 578.

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 1 .

H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

better, and can suppress men and their liberties even more brutally

than the odious and sordid government of Napoleon III.

What do the masses care for 'us'? The masses can hurl in the teeth

of the European ruling class, 'We were hungry and you gave us chatter,

we were naked and you sent us beyond our frontiers to kill other

hungry and naked men.' Parliamentary government in England is

certainly no answer, for it, in common with other so-called democratic

institutions ('traps called oases of liberty'), merely defends the rights

of property, exiles men in the interests of public safety, and keeps

under arms men who are ready, without asking why, to fire instantly

as soon as ordered. Little do naive democrats know what it is that

they believe in, and what the consequences will be. 'Why is belief

in God . . . and the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly

Utopias is not silly?'1 As for the consequences, one day there really

will be democracy on earth, the rule of the masses. Then indeed

something will occur.

The whole of Europe will leave its normal courses and will be

drowned in a general cataclysm . . . Cities taken by storm and looted

will fall into poverty, education will decline, factories will come to

a stop, villages will be emptied, the countryside will remain without

hands to work it, as after the Thirty Years' War. Exhausted and

starving peoples will submit to everything, and military discipline

will take the place of law and of every kind of orderly administration. Then the victors will begin to fight for their loot. Civilisation, industry, terrified, will Ree to England and America, taking with them from the general ruin, some their money, others their

scientific knowledge or their unfinished work. Europe will become

a Bohemia after the Hussites.

And then, on the brink of suffering and disaster, a new war will

break out, home grown, internal, the revenge of the have-nots

against the haves . . . Communism will sweep across the world in

a violent tempest-dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift; in thunder and

lightning, amid the fire of the burning palaces, upon the ruin of

factories and public buildings the New Commandments will be

enunciated . . . the New Symbols of the Faith.

They will be connected in a thousand fashions with the historic

ways of life . . . but the basic tone will be set by socialism. The

institutions and structure of our own time and civilisation will

perish -will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be liquidated.

You regret the death of civilisation?

1 'From the Other Shore': VI 104.

97

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

I , too, I am sorry.

But the masses will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave

nothing but tears, want, igrwrance and humiliation.1

It is prophecies of this type by the founding fathers of the New

Order that cause embarrassment to contemporary Soviet critics and

hagiographers. They are usually dealt with by omission.

Heine and Burckhardt too had seen nightmarish visions, and spoke

of the demons called into being by the injustices and the 'contradictions'

of the new world, which promised not Utopia but ruin. Like them,

Herzen harbours no illusions:

Do you not perceive these . . . new barbarians, marching to

destroy? . . . Like lava they are stirring heavily beneath the surface

of the earth . . . when the hour strikes, Herculaneum and Pompeii

will be wiped out, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust will

perish equally. This will be not a judgement, not a vengeance, but

a cataclysm, a total revolution . . . This lava, these barbarians, this

new world, these Nazarenes who are coming to put an end to the

impotent and decrepit . . . they are closer than you think. For it is

they, none other, who are dying of cold and of hunger, it is they

whose muttering you hear . . . from the garrets and the cellars,

while you and I in our rooms on the first lloor are chatting about

socialism 'over pastry and champagne'.l

Herzen is more consistently 'dialectical' than the 'scientific' socialists

who swept away the 'Utopias' of their rivals, only to succumb to

millennia! fantasies of their own. To set by the side of the classless

idyll of Engels in the Communist Manifesto let us choose these lines

by Herzen:

Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own

extremes and absurdities. Then there will again burst forth from

the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once

more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy

the place of today's conservatism, and will be defeated by the

coming revolution as yet invisible to us . . . 8

The historical process has no 'culmination'. Human beings have

invented this notion only because they cannot face the possibility of

an endless conftict.

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 5-17.

2 'From the Other Shore': VI 58-9.

a ibid.: VI uo.

H ERZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LIBERTY

Such passages as these have their analogues in savage prophecies by

Hegel and by Marx, who also predicted the doom of the bourgeoisie,

and death and lava and a new civilisation. But, whereas there is in

both Hegel and Marx an unmistakable note of sardonic, gloating joy

in the very thought of vast, destructive powers unchained, and the

coming holocaust of all the innocents . and the fools and the contemptible philistines, so little aware of their terrible fate, Herzen is free from this prostration before the mere spectacle of triumphant

power and violence, from contempt for weakness as such, and from

the romantic pessimism which is at the heart of the nihilism and

fascism that was to come; for he thinks the cataclysm neither inevitable nor glorious. He despises these liberals who begin revolutions and then try to extinguish their consequences, who at the same time

undermine the old order and cling to it, light the fuse and try to

stop the explosion, who are frightened by the emergence of that

mythical creature, their 'unfortunate brother, cheated of his inheritance',1 the worker, the proletarian who demands his rights, who does not realise that while he has nothing to lose, the intellectual may lose

everything. It is the liberals who betrayed the revolution in 1 848 in

Paris, in Rome, in Vienna, not only by taking flight and helping the

defeated reactionaries to regain power and stamp out liberty, but by

first running away, then pleading that the 'historical forces' were too

strong to resist. If one has no answer to a problem, it is more honest

to admit this, and to formulate the problem clearly, than first to

obscure it, commit acts of weakness and betrayal, and then plead as

an excuse that history was too much for one. True, the ideals o( 1 848

were themselves empty enough; at least they looked so to Herzen in

1 869 : 'not one constructive, organic idea . . . economic blunders

(which] lead not indirectly, like political ones, but directly and deeply,

to ruin, stagnation, a hungry death'.2 Economic blunders plus 'the

arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage', 'superstitious faith in

republics'8 or in parliamentary reform, is in effect his summary of

some of the ideals of 1 848. Nevertheless, the liberals did not fight

even for their own foolish programme. And in any case liberty was

not to be gained by such means. The claims of our time are clear

enough, they are social more than economic; for mere economic

1 ibid.: VI S3·

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 576.

3 'My Past and Thoughu': XI 70.

99

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

change, as advoated by socialists, unaccompanied b y a deeper transformation, will not suffice to abolish civilised cannibalism, monarchy and religion, courts and governments, moral beliefs and habits. The

institutions of private life must be changed too.

Is it not odd that man, liberated by modern science from penury

and lawless rapacity, has nevertheless not been made free, but has

somehow been swallowed up by society? To understand the entire

breadth and reality, all the sanctity of the rights of man, and not

to destroy society, not to reduce it to atoms, is the hardest of social

problems; it will probably one day be resolved by history itself; in

the past it has never been resolved.1

Science will not solve it, pact Saint-Simon, nor will preaching against

the horrors of unbridled competition, nor advocacy of the abolition

of poverty, if all they do is to dissolve individuals into a single, monolithic, oppressive community-Gracchus Babeuf's 'equality of penal servitude'.

History is not determined. Life, fortunately, has no libretto,

improvisation is always possible, nothing makes it necessary for the

future to fulfil the programme prepared by the metaphysicians.•

Socialism is neither impossible nor inevitable, and it is the business of

the believers in liberty to prevent it from degenerating either into

bourgeois philistinism or communist slavery. Life is neither good nor

bad, men are what they make themselves. Without social sense they

become orang-utans, without egotism, tame monkeys.3 But there are

not inexorable forces to compel them to be either. Our ends are not

made for us, but by us;' hence to justify trampling on liberty today

by the promise of freedom tomorrow, because it is 'objectively'

guaranteed, is to make use of a cruel and wicked delusion as a pretext

for iniquitous action. 'If only people wanted, instead of saving the

world, to save themselves-instead of liberating humanity, to liberate

themselves, they would do much for the salvation of the world and

the liberation of man.'6

Herzen goes on to say tha:t man is of course dependent on his

environment and his time-physiologically, educationally, biologically,

as well as at more conscious levels; and he concedes that men reflect

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourth letter: V 6:z.

I 'From the Other Shore': VI 36, 9 I .

8 ibid.: VI I 30.

' ibid.: VI I 3 r.

6 ibid.: VI 1 19.

1 00

H ERZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

their own time and are affected by the circumstances of their lives.

But the possibility of opposition to the social medium, and protest

against it, is nevertheless just as real; whether it is effective or not;

whether it takes a social or an individual form.1 Belief in determinism

is merely an alibi for weakness. There will always be those fatalists

who will say 'the choice of the paths of history is not in the individual's

power. Events do not depend on persons, but persons on events: we

only seem to control our direction, but actually sail wherever the wave

takes us. '2 But this is not true.

Our paths are not unalterable at all. On the contrary, they

change with circumstances, with understanding, with personal

energy. The individual is made by . . . events, but events are also

made by individuals and bear their stamp upon them- there is

perpetual interaction . . . . To be passive tools of forces independent

of us- . . . this is not for us; to be the blind instrument of fate-the

scourge, the executioner of God, one needs naive faith, the simplicity of ignorance, wild fanaticism, a pure, uncontaminated, childlike quality of thought.•

To pretend that we are like this today would be a lie. Leaders arise,

like Bismarck (or Marx), who claim to guide their nation or their

class to the inevitable triumph reserved for them by destiny, whose

chosen instruments they feel themselves to be; in the name of their

sacred historic mission they ruin, torture, enslave. But they remain

brutal impostors.

What thinking persons have forgiven Attila, the Committee of

Public Safety, even Peter the First, they will not forgive us; we

have heard no voice calling to us from on high to fulfil a destiny;

no voice from the nether regions to point a path to us. For us, there

is only one voice, one power, the power of reason and understanding.

In rejecting them we become the unfrocked priests of science,

renegades from civilisation.'

I V

I f this is a condemnation of Bismarck or Marx, it is directed more

obviously and expressly at Bakunin and the Russian Jacobins, at

Karakozov's pistol and Chernyshevsky's 'axe', sanctified by the new

young revolutionaries; at the terrorist propaganda of Zaichnevsky or

1 ibid.: VI 1 zo.

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 588.

a ibid.

' ibid.: XX 588-9.

101

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

of Semo-Solovievich, and the culminating horror o f Nechaev's

activity and the final perversions of revolutionary doctrine, which

went far beyond its western origins, and treated honour, compassion,

and the scruples of civilisation as so many personal affronts. From this

it is not far to Plekhanov's celebrated formula of 1 903, 'the safety

of the revolution is the supreme law', which sanctioned the suspension

of civil liberties; and so to the April Theses, and the treatment of

'inviolability of the person' as a luxury to be dispensed with in difficult

moments.

Th� chasm between Herzen and Bakunin is not bridgeable. And

the half-hearted attempts by Soviet historians, if not to slur over the

differences, at any rate to represent them as necessary and successive

stages in the evolution of a single process-necessary both logically

and historically (because history and the development of ideas obey

'logical' laws)-are melancholy failures. The views of those who, like

Herzen (or Mill), place personal liberty in the centre of their social

and political doctrine, to whom it is the holy of holies the surrender

of which makes all other activities, whether of defence or attack,

valueless;1 and, as opposed to them, of those for whom such liberty is

only a desirable by-product of the social transformation which is the

sole end of their activity, or else a transient stage of development

made inevitable by history-these two attitudes are opposed, and no

reconciliation or compromise between them is conceivable; for the

Phrygian Cap comes between them. For Herzen the issue of personal

liberty overshadows even such crucial questions as centralism against

free federation; revolution from above versus revolution from below;

political versus economic activity; peasants versus city workers;

collaboration with other parties versus refusal to transact and the cry

for 'political purity' and independence; belief in the unavoidability of

capitalist development versus the possibility of circumnavigating it;

and all the other great issues which divided the liberal and revolutionary

parties in Russia until the revolution. For those who stand 'in awe

of the Phrygian Cap', sa/us populi is a final criterion before which all

other considerations must yield. For Herzen it remains a 'criminal'

principle, the greatest tyranny of all; to accept it is to sacrifice the

1 'However low . . . governments sank,' Herzen once remarked about the

west in contrast to Russia, 'Spinoza was not sentenced to transportation, nor

Lessing to be flogged or conscripted' ('From the Other Shore': VI I s). The

twentieth century has destroyed the force of this comparison.

102

H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

freedom of individuals to some huge abstraction-some monstrosity

invented by metaphysics or religion, to escape from the real, earthly

issues, to be guilty of 'dualism', that is, to divorce the principles of

action from empirical facts, and deduce them from some other set of

'facts' provided by some special mode of vision;1 to take a path which

in the end always leads to 'cannibalism'-the slaughter of men and

women today for the sake of 'future happiness'. The Lttttrs to an Old

Comradt are aimed, above all, at this fatal fallacy. Herzen rightly held

Bakunin guilty of it, and behind the ardent phrases, the lion-hearted

courage, the broad Russian nature, the gaiety, the charm and the

imagination of his friend-to whom he remained personally devoted

to the end-he discerned a cynical indifference to the fate of individual

human beings, a childish enthusiasm for playing with human lives

for the sake of social experiment, a lust for revolution for revolution's

sake, which went ill with his professed horror before the spectacle of

arbitrary violence or the humiliation of innocent persons. He detected

a certain genuine inhumanity in Bakunin (of which Belinsky and

Turgenev were not unaware), a hatred of slavery, oppression, hypocrisy, poverty, in the abstract, without actual revulsion against their manifestations in concrete instances-a genuine Hegelianism of outlook-the feeling that it is useless to blame the instruments of history, when one can rise to a loftier height and survey the structure of

history itself. Bakunin hated tsardom, but displayed too little specific

loathing of Nicholas; he would never have given sixpences to little

boys in Twickenham to cry, on the day of the Emperor's death,

'Zamicoll is dead ! ' or feel the emancipation of the peasants as a

personal happiness. The fate of individuals did not greatly concern

him; his units were too vague and too large; 'First destroy, and then

we shall see.' Temperament, vision, generosity, courage, revolutionary

fire, elemental force of nature, these Bakunin had to overftowing.

The rights and liberties of individuals play no great part in his apo-

calyptic vision.

•

Herzen's position on this issue is clear, and did not alter throughout

his life. No distant ends, no appeals to overriding principles or abstract

nouns can justify the suppression of liberty, or fraud, violence and

tyranny. Once the conduct of life in accordance with the moral

principles that we actually live by, in the situation as we know it to

be, and not as it might, or could, or should be, is abandoned, the path

1 'From the Other Shore': VI I z6.

I OJ

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

is open to the abolition of individual freedom and of all the values of

humane culture. With genuine horror and disgust Herzen saw and

denounced the militant, boorish anti-humanism of the younger

generation of Russian revolutionaries-fearless but brutal, full of

savage indignation, but hostile to civilisation and liberty, a generation

of Calibans-'the syphilis of [the] revolutionary passions'1 of Herzen's

own generation. They paid him back by a campaign of systematic

denigration as a 'soft' aristocratic dilettante, a feeble liberal trimmer,

a traitor to the revolution, a superfluous survival of an obsolete past.

He responded with a bitter and accurate vignette of the 'new men' :

the new generation will say to the old: ' "you are hypocrites, we will

be cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like scoundrels;

you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors; we shall be

rude to all; you bow without feeling respect, we shall push and jostle

and make no apologies . . . " •a

It is a singular irony.ofhistory that Her.ten, who wanted individual

liberty more than happiness, or efficiency, or justice, who denounced

organised planning, economic centralisation, governmental authority,

because it might curtail the individual's capacity for the free play of

fantasy, for unlimited depth and variety of personal life within a wide,

rich, 'open' social milieu, who hated the Germans (and in particular

the 'Russian Germans and German Russians') ofSt Petersburg because

their slavery was not (as in Russia or Italy) 'arithmetical', ·that is,

reluctant submission to the numerically superior forces of reaction,

but 'algebraical', that is, part of their 'inner formula' -the essence of

their very being8- that Henen, in virtue of a casual phrase patronisingly dropped by Lenin, should today find himself in the holy of holies of the Soviet pantheon, placed there by a government the genesis of

which he understood better and feared more deeply than Dostoevsky,

and whose word� and acts are a continuous insult to all that he believed

and was.

Doubtless, despite all his appeals to concreteness, and his denuncia-

tion of abstract principles, Henen was himself, at times, Utopian

1 Letter to N. P. Ogarev, 1-:z May 1 868.

I 'My Past and Thoughts': XI 3 5 1 .

3 'On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia': VII 1 5. Arnold

Ruge was outraged by this and protested vehemently in his notice of the

enay in I 8 S4 when he received the German edition. See ArnDIJ Rugts

Briifwulutl unJ TtJgt6uclz6/iiJJtr tJus Jtn ]tJizrtn rBzs-rBBo, ed. P. Nerrlich

(Berlin, 1 886), vol. :z, pp. 147-8.

H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY

enough. He feared mobs, he disliked bureaucracy and organisation,

and yet he believed in the possibility of establishing the rule of

justice and happiness, not merely for the few, but for the many, if

not in the western world, at any rate in Russia; and that largely

out of patriotism: in virtue of the Russian national character which

had proved itself so gloriously by surviving Byzantine stagnation, and the Tartar yoke and the German truncheon, its own officials, and through it all preserving the inner soul of the people

intact. He idealised Russian peasants, the village communes, free

ortels; similarly he believed in the natural goodness and moral nobility

of the workers of Paris, in the Roman populace, and despite the

increasingly frequent notes of 'sadness, scepticism and irony . . . the

three strings of the Russian lyre',1 he grew neither cynical nor

sceptical. Russian populism owes more to his ungrounded optimism

than to any other single source of its inspiration.

Yet compared to Bakunin's doctrines, Herzen's views are a model

of dry realism. Bakunin and Herzen had much in common : they

shared an acute antipathy to Marxism and its founders, they saw no

gain in the replacement of one class of despotism by another, they did

not believe in the virtues of proletarians as such. But Herzen does at

least face genuine political problems, such as the incompatibility of

unlimited personal liberty with either social equality, or the minimum

of 90Cial organisation and authority; the need to sail precariously

between the Scylla of individualist 'atomisation' and the Charybdis of

collectivist oppression; the sad disparity and conRict between many,

equally noble human ideals; the nonexistence of 'objective', eternal,

universal moral and political standards, to justify either coercion or

resistance to it; the mirage of distant ends, and the impossibility of

doing wholly without them. In contrast to this, Bakunin, whether

in his various Hegelian phases, or his anarchist period, gaily dismisses

such problems, and sails off into the happy realm of revolutionary

phraseology with the gusto and the irresponsible delight in words

which characterised his adolescent and essentially frivolous outlook.

v

Bakunin, as his enemies and followers will equally testify, dedicated

his entire life to the struggle for liberty. He fought for it in action

1 'The Russian People and Socialism: Letter to Monsieur ]. Michelet':

VII 330.

1 05

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

and i n words. More than any other individual in Europe h e stood for

ceaseless rebellion against every form of constituted authority, for

ceaseless protest in the name of the insulted and oppressed of every

nation and class. His power of cogent and lucid destructive argument

is extraordinary, and has not, even today, obtained proper recognition.

His arguments against theological and metaphysical notions, his

attacks upon the whole of western Christian tradition-social, political,

and moral- his onslaughts upon tyranny, whether of states or classes,

or of special groups in authority-priests, soldiers, bureaucrats, democratic representatives, bankers, revolutionary elites-are set forth in language which is still a model of eloquent polemical prose. With

much talent and wonderful high spirits he carried on the militant

tradition of the violent radicals among the eighteenth-century philosophes. He shared their buoyancy but also their weaknesses, and his positive doctrines, as so often theirs, turn out to be mere strings of

ringing commonplaces, linked together by vague emotional relevance

or rhetorical afflatus rather than a coherent structure of genuine ideas.

His affirmative doctrines are even thinner than theirs. Thus, as his

positive contribution to the problem of defining freedom, he offers:

'Tous pour chacun et chacun pour tous.'1 This schoolboy jingle, with

its echo of The Three Musketeers, and the bright colours of historical

romance, is more characteristic of Bakunin, with . his irrepressible

frivolity, his love of fantasy, and his lack of scruple in action and in

the use of words, than the picture of the dedicated liberator painted

by his followers and worshipped from afar by many a young revolutionary sent to Siberia or to death by the powe.- of his unbridled eloquence. In the finest and most uncritical manner of the eighteenth century, without examining (despite his Hegelian upbringing and his

notorious dialectical skill) whether they are compatible (or what they

signify), Bakunin lumps all the virtues together into one vast undifferentiated amalgam: justice, humanity, goodness; freedom, equality ('the liberty of each for the equality of all' is another of his empty

incantations), seience, reason, good sense, hatred of privilege and of

monopoly, hatred of oppression and exploitation, of stupidity and

poverty, of weakness, inequality, injustice, snobbery-all these are

represented as somehow forming one single, lucid, concrete ideal, for

which the means would be only too ready to hand if only men were

1 'Letter to the Committee of the Journal L'Egt�litl', Oeuf!f'ts, ed. J.

Guillaume, vol. S (Paris, I9I I), p. I S ·

I o6

HERZEN AND BAK U N I N ON LIBERTY

not too blind or too wicked to make use of them. Liberty will reign

i n 'a new heaven and a new earth, a new enchanting world in which

all the dissonances will fiow into one harmonious whole -the democratic and universal church of human freedom. '1 Once launched upon the waves of this type of mid-nineteenth-century radical patter, one

knows only too well what to expect. To paraphrase another passage,

I am not free if you, too, are not free; my liberty must be 'reflected'

in the freedom of others-the individualist is wrong who thinks that

the frontier of my liberty is your liberty-liberties are complementaryare indispensable to each other-not competitive.2 The 'political and juridical' concept of liberty is part and parcel of that criminal use of

words which equates society and the detested state. It deprives men

of liberty for it sets the individu;ll against society; upon this the

thoroughly vicious theory of the social contract-by which men have

to give up some portion of their original, 'natural' liberty in order to

associate in harmony-is founded. But this is a fallacy, for it is only in

society that men become both human and free-'only collective and

social labour liberates [man J from the yoke of . . . nature', and without

such liberation 'no moral or intellectual liberty' is possible.3 Liberty

cannot occur in solitude, but is a form of reciprocity. I am free and

human only so far as others are such. My freedom is limitless because

that of others is also such ; our liberties mirror one another-so long

as there is one slave, I am not free, not human, have no dignity and

no rights. Liberty is not a physical or a social condition but a mental

one: it consists of universal reciprocal recognition of the individual's

liberties: slavery is a state of mind and the slaveowner is as much a

slave as his chattels." The glib Hegelian claptrap of this kind with

which the works of Bakunin abound has not even the alleged

merits of Hegelianism, for it contrives to reproduce many of the worst

confusions of eighteenth-century thought, including that whereby the

comparatively clear, if negative, concept of personal liberty as a

condition in which a man is not coerced by others into doing what he

does not wish to do, is confounded with the Utopian and perhaps

1 Quoted by A. Ruge in his memoirs of Bakunin, in Ntut Frtit Prtsu,

April/May r 876.

2 'Three Lectures to the Workers of Val de Saint-lmier', in J. Guillaume

(ed.), op. cit. (p. r o6, note 1 above), vol. 5, pp. 23 1-2.

8 M. Bakunin, 'The Knouto-German Empire and the Social Revolu tion',

Iz6rannyt Jochintniya, vol. 2 (PetrogradfMoscow, 192 2), pp. 2 3 5-6.

4 ibid., pp. 236-8.

107

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

unintelligible notion of being free from laws in a different sense of

'law' - from the necessities of nature or even of social coexistence. And

from this it is inferred that since to ask for freedom from Nature is

absurd, since I am what I am as part of her, therefore, because my

relationships with other human beings are part of 'Nature', it is

equally senseless to ask for freedom from them-what one should

seek is a 'freedom' which consists in a 'harmonious solidarity' with

them.

Bakunin rebelled against Hegel and professed to hate Christianity;

but his language is a conventional amalgam of both. The assumption

that all virtues are compatible, nay, mutually entailed by one another,

that the liberty of one man can never clash with that of another if

both are rational (for then they cannot desire conflicting ends), that

unlimited liberty is not only compatible with unlimited equality but

inconceivable without it-; reluctance to attempt a serious analysis of

either the notions of liberty or of equality; the belief that it is only

avoidable human folly and wickedness which are responsible for

preventing the natural goodness and wisdom of man from making a

paradise upon earth almost instantaneously, or at least as soon as the

tyrannical state, with its vicious and idiotic legal system, is destroyed

root and branch-all these naive fallacies, intelligible enough in the

eighteenth century, but endlessly criticised in Bakunin's own sophisticated century, form the substance of his st"rmons urbi et orbi; and in particular of his fiery allocutions to the fascinated watchmakers of La

Chaux-de-Fonds and the Valley of Saint-lmier.

Bakunin's thought is almost always simple, shallow, and clear; the

language is passionate, direct and imprecise, riding from climax to

climax of rhetorical evidence, sometimes expository, more often

hortatory or polemical, usually ironical, sometimes sparkling, always

gay, always entertaining, always readable, seldom related to facts of

experience, never original or serious or specific. Liberty-the wordoccurs ceaselessly. Sometimes Bakunin speaks of it in exalted semireligious terms, and declares that the instinct to mutiny-defiance-is one of the three basic 'moments' in the development of humanity,

denounces God and rays homage to Satan, the first rebel, the true

friend of freedom. In such 'Acherontic' moods, in words which

resemble the opening of a revolutionary marching song, he declares

that the only true revolutionary element in Russia (or anywhere else)

is the doughty (likhoi) world of brigands and desperadoes, who, having

nothing to lose, will destroy the old world -after which the new will

1 08

H E RZ E N AN:p BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

arise spontaneously like the phoenix from the ashes.1 He puts his

hopes in the sons of the ruined gentry, in all those who drown their

sorrows and indignation in violent outbreaks against their cramping

milieu. Like Weitling, he calls upon the dregs of the underworld, and,

in particular, the disgruntled peasants, the Pugachevs and Razins, to

rise like modern Samsons and bring down the temple of iniquity. At

other times, more innocently, he calls merely for a revolt against all

fathers and all schoolmasters: children must be free to choose their

own careers; we want 'neither demigods nor slaves', but an equal

society, above all not differentiated by university education, which

creates intellectual superiority and leads to more painful inequalities

than even aristocracy or plutocracy. Sometimes he speaks of the

necessity for an 'iron dictatorship' during the transitional period

between the vicious society of today with its 'knouto-German' army

and police, and the stateless society of tomorrow confined by no

restraints. Other times he says that all dictatorships tend inevitably to

perpetuate themselves, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is

yet one more detestable despotism of one class over another. He cries

that all 'imposed' laws, being man-made, must be thrown off at once;

but allows that 'social' laws which are 'natural' and not 'artificial'

will have to be obeyed-as if these latter are fixed and immutable and

beyond human control. Few of the optimistic confusions of the

eighteenth-century rationalists fail to make an appearance somewhere

in his works. After proclaiming the right- the duty-to mutiny, and

the urgent necessity for the violent overthrow of the state, he happily

proclaims his belief in absolute historical and sociological determinism,

and approvingly quotes the words of the Belgian statistician Quetelet:

'Society . . . prepares crimes, criminals are only the instruments necessary for executing them.'2 Belief in free will is irrational, for like Engels he believes that 'freedom is . . . the inescapable end result of

natural and social necessity'.3 Our human, as well as natural, environment shapes us entirely: yet we must fight for man's independence not of 'the laws of nature or society' but of all the laws, 'political,

criminal or civil', imposed on him by other men 'against his personal

1 See his pamphlet of 1 869, 'A Statement of the Revolutionary Question',

in M. A. Bakunin, Rtclli i t�oxzt�aniya (Moscow, 1906), pp. 2J S-H·

2 V. A. Polonsky (ed.), Mattrialy dlya 6iografii M. Baltunina, vol. 3

(Moscow, 1928), p. 43·

3 ibid., p. 12 I .

1 09

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

convictions'.1 That i s Bakunin's final, most sophisticated definition

of liberty, and the meaning of this phrase is for anybody to seek. All

that clearly emerges is that Bakunin is opposed to the imposition of

any restraints upon anyone at any time under any conditions. Moreover he believes, like Holbach or Godwin, that once the artificial restraints imposed upon mankind, by blind tradition, or folly, or

'interested vice', are lifted, all will automatically be set right, and

justice, virtue, happiness, pleasure, and freedom will immediately

commence their united sway on earth. The search for something

more solid in Bakunin's utterances is unrewarding.a He used words

principally not for descriptive but for inflammatory purposes, and was

a great master of his medium; even today his words have not lost their

power to stir.

Like Herzen he disliked the new ruling class, the 'Figaros in

power', ' Figaro-bankers' and ' Figaro-ministers' whose livery could

not be shed because it had become part of their skins. He liked free

men and unbroken personalities. He detested spiritual slavery more

than any other quality. And like Herzen he looked on the Germans

as irredeemably servile and said so with insulting repetitiveness:

When an Englishman or an American says ' I am an Englishman', 'I am an American', they are saying ' I am a free man'; when a German says ' I am a German' he is saying ' I am a slave, but my

Emperor is stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German

soldier who is strangling me will strangle you all' . . . every people

has tastes of its own-the Germans are obsessed by the big stick of

the state.3

Bakunin recognized oppression when he saw it; he genuinely rebelled

against every form of established authority and order, and he knew

an authoritarian when he met one, whether he was Tsar Nicholas

and Bismarck, or Lassalle and Marx (the latter triply authoritarian,

in his view, as a German, a Hegelian and a Jew).' But he is not a

serious thinker; he is neither a moralist nor a psychologist; what is

to be looked for in him is not social theory or political doctrine, but

1 ibid., pp. I 22-3.

I Her zen, in a letter to Turgenev of 10 November 1 862, justly called

it 'fatrtu bakuninskoi demagogii' ('Bakunin's demagogic hotchpotch').

B M. Bakunin, 'Statism and Anarchy', in A. Lehning (ed.), Arclzif!�l

Balou11i11�, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1967), p. 3 58.

' ibid., p. 3 17.

1 1 0

H E R Z E N AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

an outlook and a temperament. There are no coherent ideas to be

extracted from his writings of any period, only fire and imagination,

violence and poetry, and an ungovernable desire for strong sensations,

for life at a high tension, for the disintegration of all that is peaceful,

secluded, tidy, orderly, small scale, philistine, established, moderate,

part of the monotonous prose of daily life. His attitude and his teaching

were profoundly frivolous, and, on the wholf", he knew this well,

and laughed good-naturedly whenever he was exposed.1 He wanted

to set on fire as much as possible as swiftly as possible; the thought of

any kind of chaos, violence, upheaval, he found boundlessly exhilarating. When in his famous Confession (written in prison to the Tsar) he said that what he hated most was a quiet life, that what he longed

for most ardently was always something-anything-fantastic, unheard

of adventures, perpetual movement, action, battle, that he suffocated

in peaceful conditions, he summed up the content as well as the

quality of his writings.

VI

Despite their prima facie similarities-their common hatred of the

Russian regime, their belief in the Russian peasant, their theoretical

federalism and Proudhonian socialism, their hatred of bourgeois

society and contempt for middle-class virtues, their anti-liberalism and

their militant atheism, their personal devotion, and the similarity of

their social origin, tastes, and education -the differences of the two

friends are deep and wide. Herzen (although this has been seldom

recognised even by his greatest admirers) is an original thinker,

independent, honest, and unexpectedly profound. At a time when

general nostrums, vast systems and simple solutions were in the air,

preached by the disciples of Hegel, of Feuerbach, of Fourier, of

Christian and neo-Christian social mystics, when utilitarians and

neo-medievalists, romantic pessimists and nihilists, peddlers of 'scientific' ethics and 'evolutionary' politics, and every brand of communist and anarchist, offered short-term remedies and long-term Utopiassocial, economic, theosophical, metaphysical- Herzen retained his incorruptible sense of reality. He realised that general and abstract

1 'By nature I am not a charlatan,' he said in his letter to the Tsar, 'but the

unnatural and unhappy predicament (for which, in point of fact, I was

myself responsible) sometimes made me a charlatan against my will.' V. A.

Polonsky (ed.), op. cit.(p. 109, note z above), vol. 1 (Moscow,,r 9z 3), p. I S9·

I l l

R U S S IAN TH I N K E R S

terms like 'liberty' o r 'equality', unless they were translated into

specific terms applicable to actual situations, were likely, at best,

merely to stir the poetical imagination and inspire men with generous

sentiments, at worst to j ustify stupidities or crimes. He saw-and in

his day it was a discovery of genius-that there was something absurd

i n the very asking of such general questions as 'What is the meaning

of life?' or 'What accounts f;r the fact that things in general happen

as they do?' or 'What is the goal or the pattern or the direction of

history?' He realised that such questions made sense only if they were

made specific, and that the answers depended on the specific ends of

specific human beings in specific situations. To ask always for 'ultimate' purposes was not to know what a purpose is; to ask for the ultimate goal of the singer in singing was to be interested in something

other than songs or music. For a man acted as he did each for the

sake of his own personal ends (however much, and however rightly,

he might believe them to be connected or identical with those of

others), which were sacred to him, ends for the sake of which he was

prepared to live and to die. It is for this reason that Herzen so seriously

and passionately believed in the independence and freedom of individuals; and understood what he believed in, and reacted so painfully against the adulteration or obfuscation of the issues by metaphysical

or theological patter and democratic rhetoric. In his view all that is

ultimately valuable are the particular purposes of particular persons;

and to trample on these is always a crime because there is, and can

be, no principle or value higher than the ends of the individual, and

therefore no principle in the name of which one could be permitted

to do violence to or degrade or destroy individuals-the sole authors

of all principles and all values. Unless a minimum area is guaranteed

to all men within which they can act as they wish, the only principles

and values left will be those guaranteed by theological or metaphysical

or scientific systems claiming to know the final truth about man's

place in the universe, and his functions and goals therein. And these

claims Herzen regarded as fraudulent, one and all. It is this particular

species of non-metaphysical, empirical, 'eudaemonistic' individualism

that makes Herzen the sworn enemy of all systems, and of all claims

to suppress liberties i n their name, whether in the name of utilitarian

considerations or authoritarian principles, of mystically revealed ends,

or of reverence before irresistible power, or 'the logic of the facts',

or any other similar reason.

What can Bakunin offer that is remotely comparable? Bakunin,

1 1 2.

H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY

with his gusto and his logic and his eloquence, his desire and capacity

to undermine and burn and shiver to pieces, now disarmingly childlike, at other times pathological and inhuman; with his odd combination of analytical acuteness and unbridled exhibitionism; carrying with him, with superb unconcern, the multicoloured heritage of the

eighteenth century, without troubling to consider whether some

among his ideas contradicted others - the 'dialectic' would look after

that-or how many of them had become obsolete, discredited, or had

been absurd from the beginning- Bakunin, the official friend of

absolute liberty, has not bequeathed a single idea worth considering

for its own sake; there is not a fresh thought, not even an authentic

emotion, only amusing diatribes, high spirits, malicious vignettes, and

a memorable epigram or two. A historical figure remains-the 'Russian

Bear', as he liked to describe himself- morally careless, intellectually

irresponsible, a man who, in his love for humanity in the abstract,

was prepared, like Robespierre, to wade through seas of blood ; and

thereby constitutes a link in the tradition of cynical terrorism and

unconcern for individual human beings, the practice of which is the

main contribution of our own century, thus far, to political thought.

And this aspect of Bakunin, the Stavrogin concealed inside Rudin,

the fascist streak, the methods of Attila, 'Petrograndism', sinister

qualities so remote from the lovable 'Russian Bear' -die grosse Liselwas detected not merely by Dostoevsky, who exaggerated and caricatured it, but by Herzen himself, who drew up a formidable indictment against it in the Letters to an Old Comrade, perhaps the most instructive, prophetic, sober and moving essays on the prospects of

human freedom written in the nineteenth century.

1 As Herzen used to call him after his three-year-old daughter, Bakunin's

friend.

A Remarkable Decade

I

T H E B I R T H O F T H E R U S S I A N

I N T E L L I G E N T S I A

I

M v title- 'A Remarkable Decade'-and my subject are both taken

from a long essay in which the nineteenth-century Russian critic and

literary historian, Pavel Annenkov, described his friends more than

thirty years after the period with which he deals. Annenkov was an

agreeable, intelligent, and exceedingly civilised man, and a most understanding and dependable friend. He was not, perhaps, a very profound critic, nor was the range of his learning wide-he was a scholarly

dilettante, a traveller about Europe who liked to meet eminent men,

an eager and observant intellectual tourist.

It is clear that in addition to his other qualities he possessed considerable personal charm, so much, indeed, that he even succeeded in captivating Karl Marx, who wrote him at least one letter considered

important by Marxists on the subject of Proudhon. Indeed, Annenkov

has left us an exceedingly vivid description of the physical appearance

and ferocious intellectual manner of the young Marx-an admirably

detached and ironical vignette, perhaps the best portrait of him that

has survived.

It is true that, after he went back to Russia, Annenkov lost interest

in Marx, who was so deeply snubbed and hurt by this desertion by

a man on whom he thought he had made an indelible impression, that

in after years he expressed himself with extreme bitterness about the

Russian intellectual fldneurs who Buttered around him in Paris in the

40s, but turned out not to have any serious intentions after ali. But

although not very loyal to the figure of Marx, Annenkov did retain

the friendship of his compatriots Belinsky, Turgenev and Herzen to

the end of his days. And it is about them that he is most interesting.

1 1 4

B I RTH O F THE R U S S IAN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA

'A Remarkable Decade' is a description by him of the life of some

among the early members-the original founders-of the Russian

intelligentsia, between 1 8 38 and 1 848, when they were all young

men, some still at the university, some j ust emerged from it. The

subject is of more than literary or psychological interest because these

early Russian intellectuals created something which was destined

ultimately to have world-wide social and political consequences. The

largest single effect of the movement, I think it would be fair to say,

was the Russian Revolution itself. These rlvoltes early Russian

intellectuals set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which

continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

until the final climax in 1 9 1 7.

It is true that the Russian Revolution (and no event had been more

discussed and speculated about during the century which preceded itnot even the great French Revolution) did not follow the lines that most of these writers and talkers had anticipated. Yet despite the

tendency to minimise the importance of such activity by such thinkers

as, for example, Tolstoy or Karl Marx, general ideas do have great

influence. The Nazis seemed to grasp this fact when they took care

at once to eliminate intellectual leaders in conquered countries, as

likely to be among the most dangerous figures in their path ; to this

degree they had analysed history correctly. But whatever may be

thought about the part played by thought in affecting human lives,

it would be idle to deny that the influence of ideas-and in particular

of philosophical ideas-at the beginning of the nineteenth century did

make a considerable difference to what happened later. Without the

kind of outlook of which, for example, the Hegelian philosophy, then

so prevalent, was both the cause and the symptom, a great deal of what

happened might, perhaps, either not have happened, or else have

happened differently. Consequently the chief importance of these

writers and thinkers, historically speaking, lies in the fact that they

set in train ideas destined to have cataclysmic effects not merely in

Russia itself, but far beyond her borders.

And these men have more specific claims to fame. It is difficult

to imagine that the Russian literature of the mid-century, and, in

particular, the great Russian novels, could have come into being save

for the specific atmosphere which these men created and promoted.

The works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and of

minor novelists too, are penetrated with a sense of their own time,

of this or that particular social and historical milieu and its ideological

,,

I I S

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

content, t o a n even higher degree than the 'social' novels o f the west.

To this topic I propose to revert later.

Lastly, they invented social criticism. This may seem a very bold

and even absurd claim to make; but by social criticism I do not mean

the appeal to standards of judgment which involve a view of literature

and art as having, or as obliged to have, a primarily didactic purpose;

nor yet the kind of criticism developed by romantic essayists, especially

in Germany, in which heroes or villains are regarded as quintessential

types of humanity and examined as such ; nor yet the critical process

(in which the French in particular showed superlative skill) which

attempts to reconstruct the process of artistic creation mainly by

analysing the social, spiritual and psychological environment and the

origins and economic position of the artist, rather than his purely

artistic methods or character or specific quality; although, to some

degree, the Russian intellectuals did all this too.

·

Social criticism in this sense had, of course, been practised before

them, and far more professionally, scrupulously and ·profoundly, by

critics in the west. The kind of social criticism that I mean is the

method virtually invented by the great Russian essayist Belinsky-the

kind of criticism in which the line between life and art is of set purpose not too clearly drawn; in which praise and blame, love and hatred, admiration and contempt are freely expressed both for artistic forms

and for the human characters drawn, both for the personal qualities

of authors and for the content of their novels, and the criteria involved

in such attitudes, whether consciously or implicitly, a.re identical with

those in terms of which living human beings are in everyday life

judged or described.

This is, of course, a type of criticism which has itself been much

criticised. It is accused of confusing art with life, and thereby derogating from the purity of art. Whether these Russian critics did perpetrate this confusion or not, they introduced a new attitude

towards the novel, derived from their particular outlook on life. This

outlook later came to be defin� as that peculiar to members of the

intelligentsia - and the young radicals of 1 8 38-48, Belinsky, T urgenev,

Bakunin, Herzen; whom Annenkov so devotedly describes in his

book, are its true original founders. 'Intelligentsia' is a Russian word

invented in the nineteenth century, that has since acquired worldwide significance. The phenomenon itself, with its historical and literally revolutionary consequences, is, I suppose, the largest single

Russian contribution to social change in the world.

J I 6

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN INTE L L I G ENTSIA

The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion

of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by

something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves

as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the

spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel. Historically their emergence requires some explanation.

I I

Most Russian historians are agreed that the great social schism

between the educated and the 'dark folk' in Russian history sprang

from the wound inAicted on Russian society by Peter the Great. In

his reforming zeal Peter sent selected young men into the western

world, and when they had acquired the languages of the west and

the various new arts and skills which sprang from the scientific

revolution of the seventeenth century, brought them back to become

the leaders of that new social order which, with ruthless and violent

haste, he imposed upon his feudal land. In this way he created a small

class of new men, half Russian, half foreign-educated abroad, even

if they were Russian by birth; these, in due course, became a small

managerial and bureaucratic oligarchy, set above the people, no

longer sharing in their still medieval culture; cut off from them

irrevocably. The government of this large and unruly nation became

constantly more difficult, as social and economic conditions in Russia

increasingly diverged from the progressing west. With the widening

of the gulf, greater and greater repression had to be exercised by the

ruling elite. The small group of governors thus grew more and more

estranged from the people they were set to govern.

The rhythm of government in Russia in the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries is one of alternate repression and liberalisation.

Thus, when Catherine the Great felt that the yoke was growing too

heavy, or the appearance of things became too barbarous, she relaxed

the brutal rigidity of the despotism and was duly acclaimed by Voltaire

and Grimm. When this seemed to lead to too much sudden stirring

from within, too much protest, and too many educated persons began

to compare conditions in Russia unfavourably with conditions in the

west, she scented the beginnings of something subversive; the French

Revolution finally terrified her; she clamped down again. Once more

the regime grew stern and repressive.

The situation scarcely altered in the reign of Alexander I. The

,,

RU SSIAN THINKERS

vast majority of the inhabitants of Russia still lived in a feudal darkness,

with a weak and, on the whole, ignorant priesthood exercising relativdy little moral authority, while a large army of fairly faithful and at times not inefficient bureaucrats pressed down on the more and

more recalcitrant peasantry. Between the oppressors and the oppressed

there existed a small cultivated class, largely French-speaking, aware

of the enormous gap between the way in which life could be livedor was lived-in the west and the way in which it was lived by the Russian masses. They were, for the most part, men acutely conscious

of the difference between justice and injustice, civilisation and barbarism, but aware also that conditions were too difficult to alter, that they had too great a stalce in the regime themselves, and that reform

might bring the whole structure toppling down. Many among them

were reduced either to an easy-going quasi-Voltairean cynicism, at

once subscribing to liberal principles and whipping their serfs; or to

noble, eloquent and futile despair.

This situation altered with the invasion ofNapoleon,which brought

Russia into the middle of Europe. Almost overnight, Russia found

herself a great power in the heart of Europe, conscious of her crushing

strength, dominating the entire scene, and accepted by Europeans

with some terror and great reluctance, as not merely equal but

superior to them in sheer brute force.

The triumph over Napoleon and the march to Paris were events

in the history of Russian ideas as vitally important as the reforms of

Peter. They made Russia aware of her national unity, and generated

in her a sense of herself as a great European nation, recognised as

such; as being no longer a despised collection of barbarians teeming

behind a Chinese wall, sunk in medieval darkness, half-heartedly and

clumsily imitating foreign models. Moreover, since the long Napoleonic

war had brought about great and lasting patriotic fervour, and, as a

result of a general participation in a common ideal, an increase in the

feeling of equality between the orders, a number of relatively idealistic

young men began to feel new bonds between themselves and their

nation which their education could not by itself have inspired. The

growth of patriotic nationalism brought with it, as its inevitable concomitant, a growth of the feeling of responsibility for the chaos, the squalor, the poverty, the inefficiency, the brutality, the appalling

disorder in Russia. This general moral uneasiness affected the least

sentimental and perceptive, the hardest-hearted of the semi-civilised

members of the ruling class.

1 1 8

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN INTE L L I G E NTSIA

Ill

There were other factors which contributed to this collective sense of

guilt. One, certainly, was the coincidence (for coincidence it was) of

the rise of the romantic movement with the entrance of Russia into

Europe. One of the cardinal romantic doctrines (connected with the

cognate doctrines that history proceeds according to discoverable laws

or patterns, and that nations are unitary 'organisms', not mere collections, and 'evolve' in an 'organic', not a mechanical or haphazard fashion) is that everything in the world is as and where and when it

is because it participates in a single universal purpose. Romanticism

encourages the idea that not only individuals but groups, and not only

groups but institutions-states, churches, professional bodies, associations that have ostensibly been created for definite, often purely utilitarian purposes - come to be possessed by a 'spirit' of which they

themselves might well be unaware-awareness of which is, indeed,

the very process of enlightenment.

The doctrine that every human being, country, race, institution

has its own unique, individual, inner purpose which is itself an

'organic' element in the wider purpose of all that exists, and that in

becoming conscious of that purpose it is, by this very fact, participating

in the march towards light and freedom- this secular version of an

ancient religious belief powerfully impressed the minds of the young

Russians. They imbibed it all the more readily as a result of two causes,

one material, one spiritual.

The material cause was the unwillingness of the government to

let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly

after 1 830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual

upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Gennany

lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that

would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of

the Russian autocracy.

The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-francophile sentiment

in Gennany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Cennans

themselves believed in ideas-in this case those of the French enlightenment-so much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsises who dutifully went to Gennany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there

,,

1 19

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

than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easygoing early years of Louis Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.

If this was the first cause of romantic ferment, the second was its

direct consequence. The young Russians who had travelled to

Germany, or read German books, became possessed with the simple

idea that if, as ultramontane Catholics in France and nationalists in

Germany were sedulously maintaining, the French Revolution and

the decadence that followed were scourges sent upon the people for

abandoning their ancient faith and ways, the Russians were surely

free from these vices, since, whatever else might be true of them, no

revolution had been visited upon them. The German romantic

historians were particularly zealous in preaching the view that, if the

west was declining because of its scepticism, its rationalism, its

materialism, and its abandonment of its own spiritual tradition, then

the Germans, who had not suffered this melancholy fate, should be

viewed as a fresh and youthful nation, with habits uncontaminated

by the corruption of Rome in decay, barbarous indeed, but full of

violent energy, about to come into the inheritance falling from the

feebie hands of the French.

The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step

further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of

education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more

powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its

pristine purity and the young, unwearied German nation, directed

as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations,

was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover, it

stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes,

from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The

proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which

his 'essence' was intended. This could not consist in scientific rationalism (as the French eighteenth-century materialists had taught), for it was a delusion to think that life was governed by mechanical laws. It

was an even worse delusion to suppose that it was possible to apply a

scientific discipline, derived from the study of inanimate matter, to

the rational government of human beings and the organisation of

their lives on a world-wide scale. The duty of man was something

very different-to understand· the texture, the 'go', the principle of

1 20

B I RT H OF T H E R U SS I A N IN T E L L I G ENTSIA

life of all there is, to penetrate to the soul of the world (a theological

and mystical notion wrapped by the followers of Schelling and Hegel

in rationalist terminology), to grasp the hidden, 'inner' plan of the

universe, to understand his own place in it, and to act accordingly.

The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or

of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called 'the Idea', and discover

whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river,

the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people

with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No

amount of observation of the outer world would ever teach you where

this inward Drong, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it

was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual

self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger 'organism' to which you belonged. To the question of how this organism was to be identified what it was-the various metaphysicians who founded the principal romantic schools of philosophy replied differently. Herder declared

this unit to be a spiritual culture or way of life; the Roman Catholic

penseurs identified it with the life of the Christian Church; Fichte

somewhat obscurely, and after him Hegel unequivocally, declared it

to be the national state.

The whole notion of organic method militated in favour of supposing that the favourite instrument of the eighteenth centurychemical analysis into constituent bits, into ultimate, irreducible atoms, whether of inanimate matter or of social institutions-was an inadequate

way of apprehending anything. 'Growth' was the great new term new, that is, in its application far beyond the bounds of scientific biology; and in order to apprehend what growth was, you had to have

a special inner sense capable of apprehending the invisible kingdom,

an intuitive grasp of the impalpable principle in virtue of which a

thing grows as it does; grows not simply by successive increments of

'dead' parts, but by some kind of occult vital process that needs a

quasi-mystical power of vision, a special sense of the Row of life, of

the forces of history, of the principles at work in nature, in art, in

personal relationships, of the creative spirit unknown to empirical

science, to seize upon its essence.

I V

This is the heart of political romanticism, from Burke to our own

day, and the source of many passionate arguments directed against

,I

1 21

R U SSIAN TH INKERS

liberal reform and every attempt to remedy social evils by rational

means, on the grounds that these were based on a 'mechanical' outlook

-a misunderstanding of what society was and of how it developed.

The programmes of the French Encyclopedists or of the adherents of

Lessing in Germany were condemned as so many ludicrous and

Procrustean attempts to treat society as if it were an amalgam of

bits of inanimate stuff, a mere machine, whereas it was a palpitating,

living whole.

The Russians were highly susceptible to this propaganda, which

drew them in both a reactionary and a progressive direction. You

cauld believe that life or history was a river, which it was useless and

perilous to resist or deflect, and with which you could only merge

your identity-according to Hegel by discursive, logical, rational

activity of the Spirit; according to Schelling intuitively and imaginatively, by a species of inspiration the depth of which is the measure of human genius, from which spring myths and religions, art and

science. This led in the conservative direction of eschewing everything analytical, rational, empirical, everything founded upon experiment and natural science. On the other hand, you might declare that you felt within the earth the pangs of a new world struggling to be

born. You felt-you knew-that the crust of the old institutions was

about to crack under the violent inner heavings of the Spirit. If you

genuinely believed this, then you would, if you were a reasonable

being, be ready to risk identifying yourself with the revolutionary

cause, for otherwise it would destroy you. Everything in the cosmos

was progressive, everything moved. And if the future lay in the

fragmentation and the explosion of your present universe into a new

form of existence, it would be foolish not to collaborate with this

violent and inevitable process.

German romanticism, in particular the Hegelian school, was

divided on this issue; there were movements in both directions in

Germany, and consequently also in Russia, which was virtually an

intellectual dependency of German academic thought. But whereas

in the west ideas of this kind had for many years been prevalenttheories and opinions, philosophical, social, theological, political, had since the Renaissance at feast, clashed and collided with each other

in a vast variety · of patterns, and formed a general process of rich

intellectual activity in which no one idea or opinion could for long

hold undisputed supremacy-in Russia this was not the case.

One of the great differences between the areas dominated by the

1 22

B I RT H O F THE R U SSIAN INTEL L I G ENTSIA

eas.:em and the western Churches was that the former had had no

Renaissance and no Reformation. The Balkan peoples could blame

th'e Turkish conquest for their backwardness. But the case was little

better in Russia, which did not have a gradually expanding, literate,

educated class, connecting-by a series of social and intellectual stepsthe most and the least enlightened. The gap between the illiterate peasants and those who could read and write was wider in Russia

than in other European states, in so far as Russia could be called

European at this time.

Thus the number and variety of social or political ideas to be heard

if you moved in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow were nothing

like so great as you would find in the intellectual ferment of Paris or

Berlin. Paris was, of course, the great cultural Mecca of the time. But

even Berlin was scarcely less agitated with intellectual, theological,

artistic controversies, despite the repressive Prussian censorship.

You must therefore imagine in Russia a situation dominated by

three main factors: a dead, oppressive, unimaginative government

chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change

largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its

more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform-and that of

a very radical kind- for instance with regard to the serf system or

the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable.

The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian

population-an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen

and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to

act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small,

educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western

ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new

social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture.

May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in

Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a

unique mission to fulfil if only he could know what it was; and that

this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas,

perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was

not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and

political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in

France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the

educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence

1 23

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

of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by

the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread

illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such

were regarded, by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid

bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas which in the west competed

with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become

dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for

survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals

and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas

to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital

cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, indeed

for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled

sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual

freshness, passionate resolve to panicipate in world affairs, a troubled

consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country,

and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was,

was mostly imponed from abroad-scarcely one single political and

social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was born

on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy's idea of non-resistance was something

genuinely Russian-a restatement of a Christian position so original

that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general,

I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or

political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some

ultimate western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west

eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.

v

You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable

society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which

might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone

brought back a book or collection of pamphlets from Paris (or because

some audacious bookseller had smuggled them in) ; because someone

attended the lectures of a neo-Hegelian in Berlin, or had made friends

with Schelling, or had met an English missionary with strange ideas.

Genuine excitement was generated by the arrival of a new 'message'

emanating from some disciple of Saint-Simon or FouJier, of a book

by Proudhon, by Cabet, by Leroux, the latest social Messiahs in

France; or again, by an idea attributed to Davia Strauss or Ludwig

Feuerbach or Lamennais or some other forbidden author. Because of

their relative scarcity in Russia, these ideas and fragments of ideas

1 24

B I RTH OF T H E R U S S I AN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA

would be seized upon with the utmost avidity. The social and economic

prophets in Europe seemed full of confidence in the new revolutionary

future, and their ideas had an intoxicating effect upon the young

Russians.

When such doctrines were pro1pulgated in the west, they sometimes excited their audience, and occasionally led to the formation of parties or sects, but they were not regarded by the majority of those

whom they reached as the final truth; and even those who thought

them crucially important did not immediately begin to put them into

practice with every means at their disposal. The Russians were liable

to do just this; to argue to themselves that if the premises were true

and the reasoning correct, true conclusions followed : and further, that

if these conclusions dictated certain actions as being necessary and

beneficial, then if one was honest and serious one had a plain duty to

try to realise them as swiftly and as fully as possible. Instead of the

generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating,

somewhat religious nation, I should like to suggest, at least as far as

the articulate intelligentsia are concerned, that they were somewhat

exaggerated Westerners of the nineteenth century; and that so far

from being liable to irrationalism. or neurotic self-absorption, what

they possessed in a high, perhaps excessive, degree was extremely

devdoped powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.

It is true that when people tried to put these Utopian schemes

into operation and were almost immediately frustrated by the police,

disillusionment followed, and with it a liability to fall into a state of

apathetic melancholy or violent exasperation. But this came later. The

original phase was neither mystical nor introspective, but on the

contrary rationalist, bold, extroverted and optimistic. I think it was the

celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky who once said about the Russians

that, whatever other qualities they might have, they never recoiled

froin the consequences of their own reasoning. If you study the

Russian 'ideologies' of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth

century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult,

the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater

is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at

any rate, tend to embrace it; for to do so seems to them no more than

a proof of a man's moral sincerity, of the genuineness of his devotion

to the truth and of his seriousness as a human being; and although

th� consequences of one's reasoning may appear prima fane unplausible or even downright absurd, one must not for that reason 1 25

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

recoil from them, for what would that be but cowardice, weakness,

or-worst of all- the setting up of comfort before the truth? Herzen

once said :

We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German

capacity we add our own national . . . element, ruthless, fanatically

dry : we are only too willing to cut off heads . . . With fearless step we

march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the

dialectic, only with the truth . . .

And this characteristically acid comment is, as a verdict on some of

his contemporaries, not altogether unjust.

VI

Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified

regime of Nicholas I -men with a degree of passion for ideas perhaps

never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they

come from the west with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making

plans to translate them swiftly into practice-and you will have some

notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like . .They

were a small group of litterateurs, both professional and amateur,

conscious of being alone in a bleak world, with a hostile an� arbitrary

government on the one hand, and a completely uncomprehending

mass of oppressed and inarticulate peasants on the other, conceiving

of themselves as a kind of self-conscious army, carrying a banner for

all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life.

Like persons in a dark wood, they tended to feel a certain solidarity

simply because they were so few and far between ; because they were

weak, because they were truthful, because they were sincere, because

they were unlike the others. Moreover, they had accepted the romantic

doctrine that every man is called upon to perform a mission beyond

mere selfish purposes of material existence; that because they had had

an education superior to that of their oppressed brothers they had a

direct duty to help them toward the light; that this duty was uniquely

binding upon them, and that, if they fulfilled it, as history surely

intended them to do, the future of Russia might yet be as glorious

as her past had been empty and dark; and that for this they must

preserve their inner solidarity as a dedicated group. They were a

persecuted minority who drew strength from their very persecution;

they were the self-conscious bearers of a western message, freed from

the chains of ignorance and prejudice, stupidity or cowardice, by

1 26

B I RTH OF THE R U S S I AN INTELLIG ENT S I A

some great western liberator-a German romantic, a French socialistwho had transformed their vision.

The act ofliberation is something not uncommon in the intellectual

history of Europe. A liberator is one who does not so much answer your

problems, whether of theory or conduct, as transform them-he ends

your anxieties and frustrations by placing you within a new framework where old problems CtZe to have meaning, and new ones appear which have their solutions, as it were, already to some degree prefigured in the new universe in which you find yourself. I mean that those who were liberated by the humanists of the Renaissance or the

philosophes of the eighteenth century did not merely think their old

questions answered more correctly by Plato or Newton than by

Albertus Magnus or the Jesuits- rather they had a sense of a new

universe. Questions which had troubled their predecessors suddenly

appeared to them senseless and unnecessary. The moment at which

ancient chains fall off, and you feel yourself recreated in a new image,

can make a life. One cannot tell by whom a man might not, in this

sense, be set free-Voltaire probably emancipated a greater number of

human beings in his own lifetime than anyone before or after him;

Schiller, Kant, Mill, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud have

liberated human beings. For all I know Anatole France, or even

Aldous Huxley, may have had this effect.

The Russians of whom I speak were 'liberated' by the great

German metaphysical writers, who freed them on the one hand from

the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, on the other from the dry

formulas of the eighteenth-century rationalists, which had been not

so much refuted as discredited by the failure of the French Revolution.

What Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and their numerous expositors and

interpreters provided was little short of a new religion. A corollary

of this new frame of mind is the Russian attitude to literature.

VII

There may be said to exist at least two attitudes towards literature and

the arts in general, and it may not be uninteresting to contrast them.

For short, I propose to call one French, the other Russian. But these

will be mere labels used for brevity and convenience. I hope I shall

not be thought to maintain that every French writer held what I

propose to call the ' French' attitude, or every Russian the 'Russian'.

The distinction taken in any literal sense would, of course, be gravely

misleading.

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

The French writers of the nineteenth century o n the whole believed

that they were purveyors. They thought that an intellectual or an

artist had a duty to himself and to the public-to produce as good an

object as possible. If you were a painter, you produced as beautiful a

picture as you could. If you were a writer you produced the best

piece of writing of which you were capable. That was your duty to

yourself, and it was what the public rightly expected. If your works

were good, they were recognised, and you were successful. If you

possessed little taste, or skill, or luck, then you were unsuccessful; and

that was that.

In this ' French' view, the artist's private life was of no more

concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter. If you order

a table, you are not interested in whether the carpenter has a good

motive for making it or not; or whether he lives on good terms with

his wife and children. And to say of the carpenter that his table must

in some way be degraded or decadent, because his morality is degraded

or decadent, would be regarded as bigoted, and indeed as silly : certainly

as a grotesque criticism of his merit as a carpenter.

This attitude of mind (which I have deliberately exaggerated)_ was

rejected with the utmost vehemence by almost every major Russian

writer of the nineteenth century; and this was so whether they were

writers with an explicit moral or social bias, or aesthetic writers

believing in art for art's sake. The 'Russian' attitude (at least in the

last century) is that man is one and cannot be divided; that it is not

true that a man is a citizen on the one hand and, quite independently

of this, a money-maker on the other, and that these functions can be

kept in separate compartments; that a man is one kind of personality

as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is

indivisible. To say 'Speaking as an artist, I feel this; and speaking as

a voter, I feel t!lat' is always false; and immoral and dishonest too.

Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality.

It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce

beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they

happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as

novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their

dancing.

This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the

romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been

exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were

peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated

1 28

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN I NT E L L I G ENTSIA

to the worship of some transcendent reality, to betray which is mortal

sin. They conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as

inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their

divine Maker in whatever they did; but in the first place they were

composers who wrote works to order and strove to make them as

melodious as possible. By the nineteenth century, the notion of the

artist as a sacred vessel, set apart, with a unique soul and unique status,

was exceedingly widespread. It was born, I suppose, mainly among

the Germans, and is connected with the belief that it is the duty of

every man to give himself to a cause; that upon the artist and poet

this duty is binding in a special degree, for he is a wholly dedicated

being; and that his fate is peculiarly sublime and tragic, for his form

of

himself totally to his ideal. What this

ideal is, is comparatively unimportant. The essential thing is to offer

oneself without calculation, to give all one has for the sake of the light

within (whatever it may illuminate) from pure motives. For only

motives count.

Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public

stage, testifying; so that the smallest lapse on his part, a lie, a deception,

an act of self-indulgence, lack of zeal for the truth, was a heinous

crime. If you were principally engaged in making money, then,

perhaps, you were not quite so strictly accountable to society. But if

you spoke in public at all, be it as poet or novelist or historian or

in whatever public capacity, then you accepted full responsibility for

guiding and leading the people. If this was your calling then you were

bound by a Hippocratic oath to tell the truth and never to betray it,

and to dedicate yourself selflessly to your goal.

. There are certain clear cases-Tolstoy is one of them-where this

principle was accepted literally and followed to its extreme consequences. But this tendency in Russia was far wider than Tolstoy's peculiar case would indicate. Turgenev, for example, who is commonly thought of as the most western among Russian writers, a man who believed in the pure and independent nature of art more

than, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who consciously and deliberately

avoided moralising in his novels, and was, indeed, sternly called to

order by other Russian authors for an excessive-and, it was indicated.

regrettably western-preoccupation with aesthetic principles, for

devoting too much time and attention to the mere form and style of

his works, for insufficient probing into the deep moral and spiritual

essence of his characters-even the 'aesthetic' Turgenev is wholly

129

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

committed to the belief that social and moral problems are the central

issues of life and of art, and that they are intelligible only in their own

specific historical and ideological context.

I was once astonished to see it stated, in a review by an eminent

literary critic in a Sunday newspaper, that, of all authors, Turgenev

was not particularly conscious of the historical forces of his time.

This is the very opposite of the truth. Every novel of Turgenev deals

explicitly with social and moral problems within a specific historical

setting; it describes human beings in particular social conditions at

an identifiable date. The mere fact that Turgeaev was an artist to

his marrow-bones, and understood the universal aspects of human

character or predicament, need not blind us to the fact that he fully

accepted his duty as a writer to speak the objective truth-social no

less than psychological-in public, and not to betray it.

If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the

French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations

on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends,

but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating

from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian

writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had

been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant

whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer. I can

think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the

alibi that he was one kind of person as a writer, to be judged, let us

say, solely i n terms of his novels, and quite another as a private

individual. That is the gulf between the characteristically 'Russian'

and 'French' conceptions of life and art, as I have christened them.

I do not mean that every western writer would accept the ideal which

I have attributed to the French, nor that every Russian would subscribe to what I have called the 'Russian' conception. But, broadly speaking, I think it is a correct division, and holds good even when

you come to the aesthetic writers- for instance, the Russian symbolist

poets at the turn of the last century, who despised every form of

utilitarian or didactic or 'impure' art, took not the slightest interest

in social analysis or psychological novels, and accepted and exaggerated

the aestheticism of the west to an outre degree. Even these Russian

symbolists did not think that they had no moral obligation. They

saw themselves, indeed, as Pythian priestesses upon some mystical

tripod, as seers of a reality of which this world was merely a dark

symbol and occult expression, and, remote though they were from social

1 30

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA

idealism, believed with moral and spiritual fervour in their own sacred

vows. They were witnesses to a mystery; that was the ideal which

they were morally not permitted, by the rules of their art, to betray.

This attitude is utterly different from anything that Flaubert laid

down about the fidelity of the artist to his art, which to hin\ is identical

with the proper function of the artist, or the best method of becoming

as good an artist as one could be. The attitude which I attribute to

the Russians is a specifically moral attitude; their attitude to life and

to art is identical, and it is ultimately a moral attitude. This is something not to be confused with the notion of art with a utilitarian purpose, in which, of course, some of them believed. Certainly, the

men of whom I propose to speak-the men of the 30s and early 40Sdid not believe that the business of novels and the business of poetry was to teach men to be better. The ascendancy of utilitarianism came

much later, and it was propagated by men of far duller and cruder

minds than those with whom I am here concerned.

The most characteristic Russian writers believed that writers are,

in the first place, men; and that they are directly and continually

responsible for all their utterances, whether made in novels or in

private letters, in public speeches or in conversation. This view, in

turn, affected western conceptions of art and life to a marked degree,

and is one of the arresting contributions to thought of the Russian

intelligentsia. Whether for good or ill, it made a very violent impact

upon the European conscience.

V I I I

A t the time o f which I speak, Hegel and Hegelianism dominated

the thought of young Russia. With all the moral ardour of which

they were capable, the emancipated young men believed in the

necessity of total immersion in his philosophy. Hegel ·Nas the great

new liberator; therefore it was a duty-a categorical duty-to express

in every act of your life, whether as a private individual or as a writer,

truths which you had absorbed from him. This allegiance-later

transferred to Darwin, to Spencer, to Marx-is difficult to understand

for those who have not read the fervid literature, above all, the

literary correspondence of the period. To illustrate it, let me quote

some ironical passages from Herzen, the great Russian publicist, who

lived the latter part of his life abroad, written when, looking back, he

described the atmosphere of his youth. It is, as so often with this

incomparable satirist, a somewhat exaggerated picture-in places a

..

IJI

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

caricature-but nevertheless it successfully conveys the mood of the

time.

After saying that an exclusively contemplative attitude is

wholly opposed to the Russian character, he goes on to talk about

the fate of the Hegelian philosophy when it was brought over to

Russia:

. . . there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic,

two parts of the Aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia . . . which was not

captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights.

People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks

because they could not agree on a definition of 'transcendental

spirit', were personally offended by opinions about 'absolute personality' and 'being in itself'. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial

towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were

written for and read to shreds- till they came out in yellow stains, till

pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur

was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a

great mathematician in Russia, that hisalgebraical symbolism was used

for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they

all have wept for joy-all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes,

Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge

himself . . . -if they had known what duels, what battles they had

started in Moscow between the Maros�ika and Mokhovaya (the

names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they

were bought . . .

I have a right to say_ this because, carried away by the torrents

of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled

when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as

'bird talk'. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence like

this: 'The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic

represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining

itself for itself, is potentialised from natural immanence into the

harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.'

He continues:

A man who went ior a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow],

went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself

to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If,

on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said

something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them,

but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in

1 32

B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN I N TE L L I G E NTSIA

its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which

might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper

category-Gemuth, or 'the tragic element in the heart'.

Herzen's ironical sentences need not be taken too literally. But

they show vividly the kind of exaltl intellectual mood in which his

friends had lived.

Let me now offer you a passage from Annenkov- from the excellent

essay called 'A Remarkable Decade', to which I referred at the outset.

It gives a different picture of these same people at the same period, and

it is worth quoting if only to correct Herzen's amusing sketch, which

may, quite unjustly, suggest that all this intellectual activity was so

much worthless gibberish on the part of a ridiculous collection of overexcited young intellectuals. Annenkov describes life in a country house, in the village of Sokolovo in 1 84 5, that had been taken for the summer

by three friends-Granovsky, who was a professor of history in the

University of Moscow, Ketcher, who was an eminent translator, and

Herzen himself, who was a rich young man of no very fixed profession,

then still vaguely in government service. They took the house for the

purpose of entertaining their friends and enjoying intellectual conversation in the evenings .

. . . only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine.

Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of

brilliant wit-on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special

fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain

intellectual level and certain qualities of character . . . They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt

. . . and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason; and

because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything

artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment,

evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was

detected at once, and . . . provoked immediate storms of ironical

mockery and merciless attack . . . The circle . . . resembled an order

of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors; it had no written constitution. Yet it knew all its members scattered over our vast country; it was not organised, but a tacit understanding prevailed.

It stretched, as it were, across the stream of the life of its time, and

protected it from aimlessly flooding its banks. Some adored it; others

detested it.

1 33

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

I X

The sort of society which Annenkov described, although it may have

about it a slight suggestion of priggishness, is the sort of society which

tends to crystallise whenever there is an intellectual minority (say in

Bloomsbury or anywhere else) which sees itself as divided by its ideals

from the world in which it lives, and tries to promote certain intellectual

and moral standards, at any rate within itself. That is what these

Russians from 1 838 to 1 848 tried to do. They were unique in Russia

in that they did not automatically come from any one social class,

even though few among them were of humble origin. They had to

be moderately well-born, otherwise their chance of obtaining an

adequate, that is to say western, education was too small.

Their attitude to each other was genuinely free from bourgeois

self-consciousness. They were not impressed by wealth, nor were

they self-conscious about poverty. They did not admire success.

Indeed they almost tried to avoid it. Few among them became successful persons in the worldly sense of that word. A number went into exile, others were professors perpetually under the eye of tsarist

police; some were poorly paid hacks and translators; some simply

disappeared. One or two of them left the movement and were regarded

as renegades. There was Mikhail Katkov, for example, a gifted

journalist and writer who had been an original member of the movement and had then crossed over to the tsarist government, and there was Vassily Botkin, the intimate friend of Belinsky and

Turgenev, who started as a philosophical tea-merchant and became

a confirmed reactionary in later years. But these were exceptional

cases.

Turgenev was always regarded as a case somewhat betwixt and

between : a man whose heart was in the right place, who was not

devoid of ideals and knew well what enlightenment was, and yet not

quite reliable. Certainly he was vehement against the serf system, and

his book, A Sportsman's Sketchts, had admittedly had a more powerful

social effect upon the public than any other book hitherto published

in Russia-something like Uncle Tom's Cahin in the United States at

a later date, from which it differed principally in being a work of art,

indeed of genius. Turgenev was regarded by the young radicals, on the

whole, as a supporter of the right principles, on the whole a friend and

an ally, but unfortunately weak, flighty, liable to indulge his love of

pleasure at the expense of his convictions; apt to vanish unaccountably

I J4

B I RT H OF T H E R U SS IAN INTE L L I G ENTSIA

-and a little guiltily-and be lost to his political friends; yet still

'one of us'; still a member of the party; still with us rather than

against us, in spite of the fact that he often did things which had to

be severely criticised, and which seemed mainly due to his unfortunate

infatuation with the French diva, Pauline Viardot, which led him

to sell his stories-surreptitiously-to reactionary newspapers in order

to obtain enough money to be able to buy a box at the opera, since

the virtuous left-wing periodicals could not afford to pay as much. A

vacillating and unreliable friend; still, and despite everything, fundamentally on our side; a man and a brother.

There was a very self-conscious sense ofliterary and moral solidarity

amongst these people, which created between them a feeling of

genuine fraternity and of purpose which certainly no other society

in Russia has ever had. Herzen, who later met a great many celebrated

people, and was a critical and intolerant, often an exceedingly sardonic

and at times cynical judge of men, and Annenkov, who had travelled

a good deal in western Europe and had a variegated acquaintance

among the notables of his day-both these connoisseurs of human

beings, in later years, confessed that never in their lives had they

again found anywhere a society so civilised and gay and free, so

enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so

gifted and attractive in every way.

1 35

II

G E R M A N R O M A N T I C I S M

I N P E T E R S B U R G A N D M O S C O W

A L L-or nearly all-historians of Russian thought or literature, whatever their other differences, seem agreed upon one thing: that the dominant inRuence upon Russian writers in the second quarter of the

nineteenth century is that of German romanticism. This judgement,

like most such generalisations of its type, is not quite true. Even if

Pushkin is held to belong to an earlier generation, neither Lermontov

nor Gogo] nor Nekrasov, to take only the most notable writers of

this time, can be regarded as disciples of these thinkers. Nevertheless,

it is true that German metaphysics did radically alter the direction of

ideas in Russia, both on the right and on the left, among nationalists,

Orthodox theologians, and political radicals equally, and profoundly

affected the outlook of the more wide-awake students at the universities,

and intellectually inclined young men generally. These philosophical

schools, and in particular the doctrines of Hegel and Schelling, are

still, in their modern transformations, not without inRuence today.

Their principal legacy to the modern world is a notorious and powerful

political mythology, which in both its right- and left-wing forms has

been used to justify the most obscurantist and oppressive movements

of our own times. At the same time the great historical achievements

of the romantic school have become so deeply absorbed into the very

texture of civilised thought in the west that it is not easy to convey

how novel, and to some minds intoxicating, they once proved to be.

The works of the early German romantic thinkers- Herder, Fichte,

Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and their followers, are not easy to read.

The treatises of Schelling, for instance-vastly admired in their dayare like a dark wood into which I do not, here at least, propose to venture-vtStigia terrent, too many eager inquirers have entered it

never to return. Yet the art and thought of this period, at any rate

in Germany, and also in eastern Europe and Russia, which were, in

effect, intellectual dependencies of Germany, are not intelligible

1 36

G E R M A N R O M ANT I C I S M

without some grasp of the fact that these metaphysicians-in particular

Schelling-caused a major shift in human thought: from the mechanistic categories of the eighteenth century to explanation in terms of aesthetic or biological notions. The romantic thinkers and poets

successfully undermined the central dogma of eighteenth-century

enlightenment, that the only reliable method of discovery or interpretation was that of the triumphant mechanical sciences. The French philosopher may have exaggerated the virtue, and the German romantics

the absurdity, of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences

to human affairs. But, whatever else it may have done, the romantic

reaction against the claims of scienti fic materialism did set up permanent doubts about the competence of the sciences of manpsychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology-to take over, and put an end to the scandalous chaos of, such human activities as history,

or the arts, or religious, philosophical, social, and political thought. As

Bayle and Voltaire had mocked the theological reactionaries of their

time, so the romantics derided the dogmatic materialists of the school

of Condillac and Holbach; and their favourite field of battle was that

of aesthetic experience.

If you wanted to know what it was that made a work of art; if

you wanted to know, for example, why particular colours and forms

produced a particular piece of painting or sculpture; why particular

styles of writing or collocations of words produced particularly strong

or memorable effects upon particular human beings in specific states

of awareness; or why certain musical sounds, when they were juxtaposed, were sometimes called shallow and at other times profound, or lyrical, or vulgar, or morally noble or degraded or characteristic of

this or that national or individual trait; then no general hypothesis of

the kind adopted in physics, no general description or classification

or subsumption under scientific laws of the behaviour of sound, or

of patches of paint, or of black marks on paper, or the utterances of

human beings, would begin to suffice to answer these questions.

What were the non-scientific modes of explanation which could

explain life, thought, art, religion, as the sciences could not? The

romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they

attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, 'intuitive' knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular

about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly

original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical

1 37

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism,

a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual

human beings were, as it were, 'finite centres', 'aspects', 'moments',

of this enormous cosmic entity-the 'living whole', the world soul,

the transcendental Spirit or Idea, descriptions of which almost recall

the fantasies of early gnosticism. Indeed the sceptical Swiss historian,

Jakob Burckhardt, said that when he listened to Schelling he began

to see creatures with many arms and feet advancing upon him. The

conclusions drawn from this apocalyptic vision are less eccentric. The

finite centres-the individual human beings-understand each other,

their surroundings and themselves, the past and to some degree the

present and the future too, but not in the same sort of way in which

they communicate with one another. When, for example, I maintain

that I understand another human being- that I am sympathetic to

him, follow, 'enter into' the workings of his mind, and that I am

for this reason particularly well qualified to form a j udgement of his

character-of his 'inner' self- 1 am claiming to be doing something

which cannot be reduced to, on the one hand, a set of systematically

classified operations and, on the other, a method of deriving further

information from them which, once discovered, could be reduced to

a technique, and taught to, and applied more or less mechanically by,

a receptive pupil. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the

outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological

classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.

There is no substitute for sympathy, understanding, insight, 'wisdom'.

Similarly, Schelling taught that if you wanted to know what it

was, for example, that made a work of art beautiful, or what it was

that gave its own unique character to a historical period, it was

necessary to employ methods different from those of experiment,

classification, induction, deduction, or the other techniques of the

natural sciences. According to this doctrine, if you wished to understand what, for example, had brought about the vast spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution, or why Goethe's Faust was a profounder

work than the tragedies of Voltaire, then to apply the methods of

the kind of psychology and sociology adumbrated by, say, Condillac

or Condorcet would not prove rewarding. Unless you had a capacity

for imaginative insight-for understanding the 'inner', the mental and

emotional-the 'spiritual' -life of individuals, societies, historical

periods, the 'inner purposes' or 'essences' of institutions, nations,

1 38

G E R MAN RO M AN TI C I S M

churches, you would for ever remain unable to explain why certain

combinations form 'unities', whereas others do not: why particular

sounds or words or acts are relevant to, fit with, certain other elements

in the 'whole', while others fail to do so. And this no matter whether

you are 'explaining' the character of a man, the rise of a movement

or a party, the process of artistic creation, the characteristics of an

age, or of a school of thought, or of a mystical view of reality. Nor is

this, according to the view I am discussing, an accident. For reality

is not merely organic but unitary: which is a way of saying that its

ingredients are not merely connected by causal relationships-they do

not merely form a pattern or harmony so that each element is seen

to be 'necessitated' by the disposition of all other elements-but each

'reRects' or 'expresses' the others; for there is a single 'Spirit' or 'Idea'

or 'Absolute' of which all that exists is a unique aspect, or an articulation-and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the

'deeper', the 'more real' it is. A philosophy is 'true' in the proportion

in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has

reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a

statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are inspired by, and

express, the 'spirit' of their milieu-state, culture, nation-which is

itself an 'incarnation' of the self-realisation of the spirit of the universe

conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work

of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an 'echo' of the cosmic harmony.

Man is finite, and his vision will always be fragmentary; the 'deeper'

the individual, the larger and richer the fragment. Hence the lofty

contempt which such thinkers express for the 'merely' empirical or

'mechanical', for the world of everyday experience whose denizens

remain deaf to the inner harmony in terms of which alone anythingand everything-is 'truly' to be understood.

The romantic critics in some cases supposed themselves not merely

to be revealing the nature of types of knowledge or thought or feeling

hitherto unrecognised or inadequately analysed, but to be building

new cosmological systems, new faiths, new forms of life, and indeed

to be direct instruments of the process of the spiritual redemption,

or 'self-realisation', of the universe. Their metaphysical fantasies arefortunately, I may add-all but dead today; but the incidental light which they shed on art, history, and religion transformed the outlook

of the west. By paying a great deal of attention to, the unconscious

1 39

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

activity o f the imagination, to the role of irrational factors, to the part

played in the mind by symbols and myths, to awareness of unanalysable

affinities and contrasts, to fundamental but impalpable connections

and differences which cut across the conventional lines of rational

classification, they often succeeded in giving an altogether novel

account of such phenomena as poetical inspiration, religious experience,

political genius, of the relationship of art to social development, or of

the individual to the masses, or of moral ideals to aesthetic or biological

facts. This account was more convincing than any that had been

given before; at any rate than the doctrines of the eighteenth century,

which had not treated such topics systematically, and largely left them

to the isolated utterances of mystically inclined poets and essayists.

So too Hegel, despite all the philosophical obfuscation for which

he was responsible, set in motion ideas which have become so universal

and familiar that we think in terms of them without being aware of

their relative novelty. This is true, for example, of the idea of the

history of thought as a continuous process, capable of independent

study. There existed, of course, accounts- usually mere catalogues

raisonnls-of particular philosophical systems in the ancient world or

in the Middle Ages, or monographs devoted to particular thinkers.

But it was Hegel who developed the notion of a specific cluster of

ideas as permeating an age or a society, of the effect of those ideas

upon other ideas, of the many invisible links whereby the feelings,

the sentiments, the thoughts, the religions, the laws and the general

outlook-what is nowadays called ideology-of one generation are

connected with the ideology of other times or places. Unlike his

predecessors Vico and Herder, Hegel tried to present this as a coherent,

continuous, rationally analysable development-the first in the fatal

line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx

to Spengler and Toynbee and all those who find spiritual comfort in

the discovery of vast imaginary symmetries in the irregular stream of

human history.

Although much of this programme is a tantasy, or at any rate a

form of highly subjective poetry in prose, yet the notion that the

many activities of the human spirit are interrelated, that the artistic

or scientific thought of an age is best understood i'n its interplay with

the social, economic, theological, legal activities pursued in the society

in which artists and scientists live and work-the very notion of

cultural history as a source oflight-is itself a cardinal step in the history

of thought. And again Schelling (following Herder) is largely respons-

I+O

G E R M AN R O M AN T I C I S M

ible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters

may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express

it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians; this

is so because artists tend to have a greater degree of sensibility to the

contours of their own age (or of other ages and cultures) than either

trained antiquaries or professional journalists, inasmuch as they are

irritable organisms; more responsive to, and conscious of, inchoate,

half-understood factors which operate beneath the surface in a given

milieu, factors which may only come to full maturity at a later period.

This was the sense in which, for �xample, Karl Marx used to maintain that Balzac in his novels had depicted the life and character not so much of his own time, as of the men of the 6os and 70s of the nineteenth century, whose lineaments, while they were still in embryo, impinged upon the sensibilities of artists long before they emerged

into the full light of day. The romantic philosophers vastly exaggerated

the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive or poetical insight;

but their fervid vision, which remained mystical and irrationalist no

matter how heavily disguised in quasi-scientific or quasi-lyrical

terminology, captivated the imagination of the young Russian intellectuals of the 30s and 405, and seemed to open a door to a nobler and calmer world from the sordid reality of the Empire ruled by Tsar

Nicholas I.

The man who, more persuasively than anyone else in Russia,

taught the educated young men of the t 8Jos to soar above empirical

facts into a realm of pure light where all was harmonious and eternally

true, was a student of Moscow University called Nicholas Stankevich,

who, while still in his early twenties, gathered round him a circle of

devoted admirers. Stankevich was an aristocratic young man of great

distinction of mind and appearance, a gentle and idealistic personality,

and exceptional sweetness of character, with a passion for metaphysics

and a gift for lucid exposition. He was born in t 8 I J, and in the course

of his short life (he died at twenty-seven) exercised a remarkable moral

and intellectual ascendancy over his friends. They idolised him in his

lifetime, and after his death worshipped his memory. Even Turgenev,

who was not addicted to uncritical admiration, painted a portrait of

him in his novel Rudin under the name of Pokorsky in which there

is not a trace of irony. Stankevich had read widely in German romantic

literature, and preached a secular, metaphysical religion which for him

had taken the place of the doctrines of the Orthodox Church in which

neither he nor his friends any longer believed.

14 1

R U SSIAN T H IN K E R S

H e taught that a proper understanding of Kant and Schelling (and

later Hegel) led one to realise that beneath the apparent disorder and

the cruelty, the injustice and the ugliness of daily life, it was possible

to discern eternal beauty, peace and hannony. Artists and scientists

were travelling their different roads to the selfsame goal (a very

Schellingian idea) of communion with this inner hannony. Art (and

this included philosophical and scientific truth) alone was immortal,

stood up unscathed against the chaos of the empirical world, against

the unintelligible and shapeless ftow of political, social, economic

events which would soon vanish and be forgotteil. The masterpieces

of art and thought were pennanent memorials to the creative power

of men, because they alone embodied moments of insight into some

portion of the everlasting pattern which lies beyond the ftux of the

appearances. Stankevich believed (as many have believed, particularly

after some great fiasco in the life of their society, in this case perhaps

the failure of the Decembrist revolution of 1 825) that in the place of

social reforms, which merely affected the outer texture of life, men

should seek rather to reform themselves within, and everything else

would be added unto them: the kingdom of heaven-the Hegelian

self-transcending Spirit-lies within. Salvation comes from individual

self-regeneration, and to achieve truth, reality, happiness, men must

learn from those who truly know : the philosophers, the poets, the

sages. Kant, Hegel, H�mer, Shakespeare, Goethe were harmonious

spirits, saints and sages who saw what the multitude would never see.

Study, endless study alone could afford a glimpse into their Elysian

world, the sole reality in which the broken fragments came together

again into their original unity. Only those who could attain to this

beatific vision were wise and good and free. To pursue material values

-social refonns or political goals of any kind�was to pursue phantoms,

to court broken hopes, frustration and misery.

For anyone who was young and idealistic in Russia between 1 830

and 1 848, or simply human enough to be depressed by the social

conditions of the country, it was comforting to be told that the

appalling evils of Russian life-the ignorance and poverty of the serfs,

the illiteracy and hypocrisy of the clergy, the corruption, inefficiency,

brutality, arbitrariness of the governing class, the pettiness, sycophancy,

and inhumanity of the merchants-that the entire barbarous system,

according to the sages of the west, was a mere bubble upon the surface

of life. It was all ultimately unimportant, the inevitable attribute of

the world of appearances which, seen from a superior vantage point,

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G E R M AN ROMANT I C I S M

did not disturb the deeper harmony. Musical images are frequent in

the metaphysics of this time. You were told that if you simply listened

to the isolated notes of a given musical instrument you might find

them ugly and meaningless and without purpose; but if you understood the entire work, if you listened to the orchestra as a whole, you would see that these apparently arbitrary sounds conspired with other

sounds to form a harmonious whole which satisfied your craving for

truth and beauty. This is a kind of translation into aesthetic terms of

the scientific method of explanation of an earlier time. Spinoza-and

some among the rationalists of the eighteenth century-had taught

that if you could understand the pattern of the universe (some said

by metaphysical intuition, others by perceiving a mathematical or

mechanical order) then you would cease to kick against the pricks,

for you would realise that whatever was real was necessarily what

and when and where it was, part of the rational order of the harmony

of the cosmos. And if you saw this you became reconciled and achieved

inner peace: for you could no longer, as a rational human being, rebel

in an arbitrary and capricious fashion against a logically necessary

order.

The transposition of this into aesthetic terms is the dominant

factor of the Gennan romantic movement. Instead of talking about

necessary connections of a scientific kind, or oflogical or mathematical

reasoning to be employed in the unravelling of these mysteries, you

are invited to use a new kind of logic which unfolds to you the

beauty of a picture, the depth of a piece of music, the truth of a

literary masterpiece. If you conceive of life as the artistic creation of

some cosmic divinity, and of the world as the progressive revelation

of a work of art-if, in short, you are converted from a seientific to

a mystical or 'transcendental' view of life and history, you may well

experience a sense of liberation. Previously you were the victim of

unexplained chaos, which rendered you indignant and unhappy, a

prisoner in a system which you vainly tried to reform and correct,

with the result that you only suffered failure and defeat. But now you

..cquired a sense of yourself willingly and eagerly participating in the

cosmic enterprise : whatever befeil necessarily fulfilled the universal,

.md thereby your own personal, design. You were wise, haFPY• anci

:ree : for you were at one with tile purposes of the universe.

Under the conditions ofiiterary censorship then prevalent in Russia.

where it was difficult to give open expression to political ami sociai

ideas, where literature was the ';ln)y vehicle in which �uch ideas

'43

R U S S IAN THINKERS

could, however cryptically, be conveyed, a programme which invited

you to ignore the repulsive (and, after the fate of the Decembrists,

perilous) political scene, and concentrate upon personal-moral,

literary, artistic-self-improvement, offered great comfort to people

who did not wish to suffer too much. Stankevich believed in Hegel

deeply and sincerely, and preached his quietist sermons with an

eloquence which sprang from a pure and sensitive heart and an unswerving faith which never left him. Such doubts as he had, he stilled within himself; and remained until his early end an unworldly saint

in whose presence his friends felt a sense of spiritual peace which

flowed from the beauty of his singularly unbroken personality, and

the feminine delicacy and charm with which he used to bind his

gentle spell upon them. This influence cea8ed with his death : he left

a few graceful, faded poems, a handful of fragmentary essays, and a

bundle of letters to his friends and to various German philosophers;

among them moving avowals to the most admired of his friends, a

young playwright and professor in Berlin in whom he discerned

something akin to genius, a disciple of Hegel whose very name is

now justly forgotten. From this scanty material it is scarcely possible

to reconstruct the personality of this leader of Russian Idealism.

His most gifted and impressionable disciple was a man of very

different cast, Mikhail Bakunin, at this time an amateur philosopher,

and already notorious for his turbulent and despotic character.

Bakunin had, by the late I 8Jos, resigned his commission in the army

and was living in Moscow largely by his wits. Endowed with an

exceptional capacity for absorbing other people's doctrines, he expounded them with fervour and enthusiasm as though they were his own, and in the course of this changed them somewhat, making them,

as a rule, simpler, clearer, cruder, and at times more convincing.

Bakunin had a considerable element of cynicism in his character, and

cared little what the exact effect of his sermons might be on his

friends-provided only that it was powerful enough; he did not ask

whether they excited or demoralised them, or ruined their lives, or

bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots for some wildly

Utopian scheme. Bakt• nin was a born agitator with sufficient scepticism

in his system not to be taken in himself by his own torrential eloquence.

To dominate individuals and sway assemblies was his mltin-: he

belonged to that odd, fortunately not very numerous, class of persons

who contrive to hypnotise others into throwing themselves into causes

-if need be killing and dying for them-while themselves remaining

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G E R M AN R O M ANT I C I S M

coldly, dearly, and ironically aware o f the effect o f the spells which

they cast. When his bluff was called, as occasionally it was, for example,

by Herzen, Bakunin would laugh with the greatest good nature, admit

everything freely, and continue to cause havoc, if anything with greater

unconcern than before. His path was strewn with victims, casualties,

and faithful, idealistic converts; he himself remained a gay, easygoing, mendacious, irresistibly agreeable, calmly and coldly destructive, fascinating, generous, undisciplined, eccentric Russian landowner to the end.

He played with ideas with adroitness and boyish delight. They came

from many sources: from Saint-Simon, from Holbach, from Hegel,

from Proudhon, from Feuerbach, from the Young Hegelians, from

Weitling. He would imbibe these doctrines during periods of short

but intensive application, and then he would expound them with a

degree of fervour and personal magnetism which was, perhaps,

unique even in that century of great popular tribunes. During the

decade which Annenkov describes, he was a fanatically orthodox

Hegelian, and preached the paradoxical principles of the new metaphysics to his friends night after night with lucidity and stubborn passion. He proclaimed the existence of iron and inexorable laws of

history, and indeed of everything else. Hegel-and Stankevich-were

right. It was idle to rebel against them, or to protest against the

cruelties and injustices which they seemed to entail; to do so was

simply a sign of immaturity, of not understanding the necessity and

beauty of the rationally organised cosmos-to fail to grasp the divine

goal in which the sufferings and disharmonies of individual lives

must, if you understood them properly, inevitably culminate and be

resolved.

Hegel taught that the spirit evolved not continuously, but by a

'dialectical' struggle of 'opposites' which (somewhat, it seems, like a

diesel engine) moved by a series of sharp explosions. This notion

suited Bakunin's temperament well, since, as he himself was fond· of

saying, he detested nothing more than peace, order, bourgeois contentment. Mere bohemianism, disorganised rebellion have been discredited too often. Hegelianism presented its tragic and violent view of life beneath the guise of an eternal rational system, an objective

'science', with all the logical paraphernalia of reasoned judgement. First

to justify the need to submit to a brutal government and a stupid

bureaucracy in the name of eternal Reason, then to justify rebellion

with the selfsame arguments, was a paradoxical task that delighted

..

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

Bakunin. In Moscow h e enjoyed his power o f turning peaceful

students into dervishes, ecstatic seekers after some aesthetic or metaphysical goal. In later life he applied these talents on a wider scale, and stirred some exceedingly unpromising human material-Swiss

watchmakers and German peasants-into unbelievable frenzies of

enthusiasm, which no one ever induced in them before or after.

During the period of which I am speaking, he concentrated these

sinister talents upon the relatively humble task of expounding Hegel's

Encydopedia, paragraph by paragraph, to his admiring friends. Among

these friends was another intimate of Stankevich, Nicholay Granovsky,

a gentle and high-minded historian who had studied in Germany and

there became a moderate Hegelian, and came back to lecture on

western medieval history in Moscow. Granovsky succeeded in making

his apparently remote subject into a means of inducing in his audiences

respect for the western tradition. He dwelt in particular on the

civilising effect of the Roman Church, of Roman law, and of the

institutions of feudalism, developing his theses in the fac-e of the

growing chauvinism-with its emphasis on the· Byzantine roots of

Russian culture-which was at this time encouraged by the Russian

Government as an antidote to the dangerous ideas of the west.

Granovsky combined erudition with a very balanced intellect, and

was not carried away by extravagant theories. Nevertheless he was

Hegelian enough to believe that the universe must have a pattern and

a goal; that this goal was slowly being approached, that humanity

was marching towards freedom, although the path was by no means

smooth or straight: obstacles occurred-relapses were frequent and

difficult to avert. Unless a sufficient number of human beings with

personal courage, strength, and a sense of dedication emerged, humanity

tended to subside into long nights of reaction, swamps from which it

extricated itself at terrible cost. Nevertheless, slowly and painfully,

but inexorably, humanity was moving towards an ideal state of

happiness, justice, truth, and beauty. Granovsky's lectures in Moscow

University in the early I 84os on the apparently recondite subject of

the late Merovingian and early Carolingian kings attracted a very

large and distinguished audience. These lectures were treated both by

the 'Westerners' and their nationalist Slavophil opponents as a quasipolitical demonstration of pro-western, liberal and rationalist sentiment: above all of faith in the transforming power of enlightened ideas, against mystical nationalism and ecclesiasticism.

I quote the example of Granovsky's famous lectures-passionately

146

G E RMAN ROMANTICISM

acclaimed by his friends, and attacked by the conservatives-as an

illustration of the peculiar disguises which in Russia (as to a lesser

extent in Germany) social and political liberalism had to adopt if it

was to find voice at all. The censorship was at once a heavy fetter

and a goad-it brought into being a peculiar brand of cryptorevolutionary writing, made more tortuous and more intense by repression, which in the end turned the whole of Russian literature

into what Henen described as 'one vast bill of indictment' against

Russian life.

The censor was the ofticial enemy, but unlike his modern successor,

he was almost wholly negative. The tsarist censorship imposed

silence but it did not directly tell professors what to teach; it did not

dictate to authors what to say and how to say it; and it did not command

composers to induce this or that mood in their audiences. It was

merely designed to prevent the expression of a certain number of

selected 'dangerous ideas'. It was an obstacle, at rimes a maddening

one. But because it was, like so much in old Russia, inefficient,

corrupt, indolent, often stupid, or deliberately lenient-and because

so many loopholes could always be found by the ingenious and the

desperate, not much that was subversive was stopped effectively. The

Russian writers who belonged to the radical intelligentsia did, after

all, publish their works, and published them, by and large, in an

almost undistorted form. The main effect of repression was to drive

social and political ideas into the relatively safe realm of literature.

This had already occurred in Germany, and it did so on a much

larger scale in Russia.

Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the government

repression in compelling literature to become political in character.

The romantic movement was itself an equally potent factor in creating

'impure' literature, in filling it with ideological content. Turgenev

himself, the 'purest' of all the men of letters of his rime, and often

taken to task for this sin by censorious preachers like Dostoevsky or

the 'materialist' critics of the 6os, did, after all, at one time, contemplate an academic career-as a professor of philosophy. He was dissuaded from this; but his early Hegelian infatuation proved a lasting inftuence on his whole view of life. Hegel's teaching drove some to

revolution, others to reaction; in either case it emancipated its adherents

from the over-simplified classifications of men by the eighteenthcentury pamphleteers into the virtuous and the vicious, the benighted or the enlightened, of events into good and bad, and from the view

,,

147

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

of both men and things as intelligible and predictable i n terms o f clear,

mechanically conceived, causal chains. For Turgenev, on the contrary,

everything is compounded of characteristics in a perpetual process of

transformation, infinitely complex, morally and politically ambivalent,

blending into constantly changing combinations, explicable only in

terms of flexible and often impressionistic psychological and historical

concepts, which allow for the elaborate interplay of factors that are

too many and too fleeting to be reduced to scientific schemata or

laws. Turgenev's liberalism and moderation, for which he was so

much criticised, took the form of holding everything in solution-of

remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical

detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced-an agnostic oscillating

contentedly between atheism and faith, belief in progress and scepticism, an observer in a state of cool, emotionally controlled doubt before a spectacle of life where nothing is quite what it seems, where

every quality is infected by its opposite, where paths are never straight,

never cross in geometrically regular patterns. For him (this is his

version of the Hegelian dialectic) reality for ever escapes all artificial

ideological nets, all rigid, dogmatic assumptions, defies all attempts

at codification, upsets all symmetrical moral or sociological systems,

and yields itself only to cautious, emotionally neutral, scrupulously

empirical attempts to describe it bit by bit, as it presents itself to the

curious eye of the morally disinterested observer. Herz.en, too, rejects

cut and dried systems and programmes: neither he nor Turgenev

accepted the positive Hegelian doctrines, the vast cosmological fantasy

-the historical theodicy which unhinged so many of their contemporaries. Both were profoundly affected by its negative aspect-the undermining of the uncritical faith in the new social sciences which

animated the optimistic thinkers of the previous century.

These were some of the more prominent and celebrated among

the avant-gardt young Russians of the late 30s and 40s-and there

were many members of this group whom there is not room to mention

Katkov, who began as a philosopher and a radical and later became a

famous and influential reactionary journalist; the philosopher Redkin,

the essayist Korsh, and the translator Ketcher; the actor Shchepkin;

wealthy young dilettanti like Botkin, Panaev, Sazonov, Ogarev,

Galakhov, the great poet Nekrasov, and many lesser figures whose

lives are of interest only to literary or social historians. But over all

these towers the figure of the critic Vissarion Belinsky. His defects

both of education and taste were notorious; his appearance was

. 148

GERMAN ROMANT I C I S M

unimpressive, his prose style left much to be desired. But he became

the moral and literary dictator of his generation. Those who came

under his influence remained affected by it long after his death ; and

whether for good or ill it transformed Russian writing-in particular

criticism-radically, and, it would seem, for ever.

149

III

V I S S A R I O N B E LI N S KY

I N I 8 s6 I van Aksakov' one of two famous Slavophil brothers, who

had no sympathy for political radicalism, wrote an account of one of

his tours of the provincial centres of European Russia. The tour was

conceived by him as a kind of nationalist pilgrimage, intended at once

to draw comfort and inspiration from direct contact with the untouched

mass of the Russian people, and to warn those who needed warning

against the horrors of the west and the snares of western liberalism.

Aksakov was bitterly disappointed.

The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man [he

wrote], to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the

reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster

who does not know-and know by heart- Belinsky's letter to Gogo!.

If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor

and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of

a fight, you will find them among Belinsky's followers . . . Slavophil

inRuence is negligible . . . Belinsky's proselytes increase.

Plainly we are dealing with a major phenomenon of some kind someone to whom, eight years after his death, idealistic young men, during one of the worst moments of repression in the nineteenth

century, looked as their leader. The literary reminiscences of the

young radicals of the 30s and 4os- Panaev and his wife, Turgenev,

Herzen, Annenkov, Ogareva, Dostoevsky-agree in stressing this

aspect of Belinsky as the 'conscience' of the Russian intelligentsia, the

inspired and fearless publicist, the ideal of the young rlvoltls, the

writer who almost alone in Russia had the character and the eloquence

to proclaim clearly and harshly what many felt, but either could not

or would not openly declare.

We can easily imagine the kind of young man Aksakov was speaking

of. In Turgenev's novel Rudin there is a mildly ironical, but sympathetic and touching, portrait of a typical radical of that time, employed 1 50

V I SSARION B E L INSKY

as tutor in a country house. He is a plain-looking, awkward, clumsy

university student, neither intelligent nor interesting; indeed he is

dim, provincial, rather a fool, but pure-hearted, embarrassingly

sincere and self-revealing, and comically naive. The student is a

radical not in the sense that he holds clear intellectual or moral

political views, but because he is filled with a vague but bitter hostility

towards the government of his country, the grey, brutish soldiers, the

dull, dishonest, and frightened officials, the illiterate, superstitious, and

sycophantic priests; with a deep distaste for the peculiar mixture

compounded of fear, greed, and a dislike of everything new or connected with the forces of life, which formed the prevailing Russian atmosphere. He is in full reaction against the queer variety of cynical

resignation which accepted the starved and semi-barbarous condition

of the serfs and the deathly stagnation of provincial Russian society as

something not merely natural, but possessing a deep, traditional value,

almost a kind of spiritual beauty, the object of a peculiar, nationalist,

quasi-religious mystique of its own. Rudin is the life and soul of the

house-party, and the young tu�or is completely taken in by his specious

liberal rhetoric, worships the ground Rudin treads on, and fills his

easy generalisations with all his own moral enthusiasm and faith in

truth and material progress. When Rudin, still gay and charming and

irresistible, still overflowing with empty liberal platitudes, refuses to

face a moral crisis, makes feeble excuses, behaves like a craven and a

fool, and gets himself out of an awkward predicament by a squalid

piece of minor treachery, his follower, the simple seeker after truth,

is left dazed, helpless, and outraged, not knowing what to believe or

which way to turn, in a typical Turgenev situation in which everyone

ends by behaving with weakness and irresponsibility that is human,

disarming, and disastrous. The tutor Basistov is a very minor figure,

but he is a direct if humble descendant of the foil-and sometimes the

dupe-ofthe or.iginal 'superfluous man' of Russian society, of Pushkin's

Lensky (as opposed to Onegin); he is of the same stock as Pierre

Bezukhov (as against Prince Andrey) in War and Peact, as Levin in

Anna Kartnina and all the Karamazovs, as Krutsifersky in Herzen's

novel Who is to hlame?, as the student in The Cherry Orc.�ard, as

Colonel Vershinin and the Baron in The Three Sisters. He is, in the

context of the 1 84os, the figure that came to be thought of as one of

the characteristic figures in the Russian social novel, the perplexed

idealist, the touchingly naive, over-enthusiastic, pure-hearted man,

the victim of misfortunes which could be averted but in fact never

R U SSIAN TH I NK E R S

are. Sometimes comial, sometimes tragical, often confused, blundering,

and inefficient, he is incapable of any falseness, or, at least, of irremediable falseness, of anything in any degree sordid or treacherous; sometimes weak and self-pitying, like Chekhov's heroes-sometimes strong and furious like Bazarov in Fathers and Children-he never loses an

inner dignity and an indestructible moral personality in contrast with

which the ordinary philistines who form the vast majority of normal

society appear at once pathetic and repulsive.

The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other

times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs

in the cause of the humiliated and the defeated-the actual, historical

embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual

heroism- is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky. His name became the

greatest Russian myth in the nineteenth century,, detestable to the

supporters of autocracy, the Orthodox Church, and fervid nationalism,

disturbing to elegant and fastidious lovers of western classicism, and

for the same reasons the idealised ancestor of both the reformers and

the revolutionaries of the second half of the century. In a very real

sense he was one of the founders of the movement which culminated

in I 9 I 7 in the overthrow of the social order which towards the end

of his life he increasingly denounced. There is scarcely a radical

Russian writer-and few liberals-who did not at some stage claim to

be descended from him. Even such timid and half-hearted members

of the opposition as Annenkov and Turgenev worshipped his memory,

even the conservative government censor, Goncharov, spoke of him

as the best man he had ever known. As for the true left-wing authors

of the 1 86os-the revolutionary propagandists Dobrolyubov and

Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, and the

socialists who followed them, Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and his

followers-they �ormally recognised him as one of the earliest, and,

with Herzen, the greatest of the heroes of the heroic 40s, when the

organised struggle for full social as well as political freedom, economic

as well as civil equality, was held to have begun in the Russian Empire.

Clearly, then, he was, to say the least, an arresting figure in the

history of Russian social thought. Those who have read the memoirs

of his friends, Herzen, Turgenev, and of course Annenkov, will

discover for themselves the reason for this. But in the west Belinsky

is even now relatively unknown. Yet, as anyone knows who has read

at all widely in his works, he is the father of the social criticism of

literature, not only in Russia but perhaps even in Europe, the most

I 52.

V I S SARION BELINSKY

gifted and formidable enemy of the aesthetic and religious and mystical

attitudes to life. Throughout the nineteenth century his views were

the great battlefield between Russian critics, that is, between two

incompatible views of art and indeed of life. He was always very poor,

and he wrote to keep alive, and, therefore, too much. Much of his

writing was composed in fearful haste, and a great deal is uninspired

hackwork. But in spite of all the hostile criticism to which he has

been exposed from his earliest beginnings as a critic (and let me add

that Belinsky is to this day the subject of heated controversy-no other

figure dead for over a century has excited so much devotion and so

much odium among Russians), his best work is in Russia regarded as

classical and immortal. In the Soviet Union his place is all too secure,

for (despite his lifelong war against dogma and conformism) he has

there long been canonised as a founding father of the new form of

life. But the moral and political issue with which he was concerned is,

in the west, open still. This alone makes him a figure of interest at

the present time.

His life was outwardly uneventful. He was born in poverty in I 8 I o

or I 8 1 1 , at Sveaborg in Finland, and brought up in the remote city

of Chembar in the province of Penza. His father was a retired naval

doctor who settled down to a small practice and to drink. He grew up

a thin, consumptive, over-serious, pinched little boy, prematurely old,

unsmiling and always in deadly earnest, who soon attrac!ed the

attention of his schoolmasters by his single-minded devotion to

literature, and his grim, unseasonable, and apparently devouring

passion for the truth. He went to Moscow as a poor scholar with a

government stipend, and after the normal troubles and misfortunes

of impoverished students of humble birth in what was still the home

of the gentry and nobility-the University of Moscow- was expelled

for reasons which are still obscure, but probably connected with lack

of solid knowledge, and the writing of a play denouncing serfdom.

The play, which survives, is very badly written, rhetorical, mildly

subversive, and worthless as a work of literature, but the moral was

plain enough for the intimidated university censors, and the author

was poor and lacked protectors. Nadezhdin, then a liberal young

professor of European literature at the university, who edited an ovantgarde periodical, was impressed by Belinsky's obvious seriousness and passion for literature, thought that he detected a spark of inspiration,

and engaged him to write reviews. From I 835 until his death thirteen

years later, Belinsky poured out a steady stream of articles, critical

,,

1 53

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

notices, and reviews i n various journals. They split educated Russian

opinion into rival camps, and became the gospel of the progressive

young men in every corner of the Empire, particularly of the university

students who became his most devoted and fanatical followers.

In appearance Belinsky was of middle height, thin, bony, and slightly

stooped; his face was pale, slightly mottled, and flushed easily when he

was excited. He was asthmatic, tired easily, and usually looked worn

out, haggard, and rather grim. His movements were awkward, like a

peasant's, nervous and abrupt, and before strangers he tended to be

shy, brusque and sullen. With his intimates, the young radicals,

Turgenev, Botkin, Bakunin, Granovsky, 'he was full of life and

irrepressible gusto. In the heat of a literary or philosophical discussion

his eyes would shine, his pupils dilate, he would walk from corner

to corner talking loudly, rapidly, and with violent intensity, coughing

and waving his arms. In society he was clumsy and uncomfortable

and tended to be silent, but if he heard what he regarded as wicked

or unctuous sentiments he intervened on principle, and Herzen

testifies that on such occasions no opponent could stand before the

force of his terrible moral fury. He was at his best when excited by

argument. Let me quote Herzen's words:

Without controversy, unless he was irritated, he did not talk well;

but when he felt wounded, when his dearest convictions were

touched, and the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice

broke-one should have seen him then: he would fling himself at

his victim like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him

ridiculous, make him pitiful, and in the course of it would develop

his own thought with astonishing power and poetry. The argument would often end in blood which poured from the sick man's throat; pale, choking, with eyes fixed on whoever he was addressing,

he would, with a trembling hand, lift the handkerchief to his

mouth, and stop-terribly upset, undone by his lack of physical

strength. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments !

At dinner with some decayed and respectable official who had

survived from the reign of the Empress Catherine, Belinsky went out

of his way to praise the execution of Louis XVI. Someone ventured

to say in front of him that Chaadaev (a Russian sympathiser with

Roman Catholicism, who had denounced the barbarism of his country)

had, in a civilised country, been very properly declared insane by the

tsar for insulting the dearest convictions of his people. Belinsky, after

vainly tugging at Herzen's sleeve and whispering to him to intervene,

J S.of.

VI SSARION B E L I N SKY

finally broke in himself, and said in a dead, dull voice that in still

more civilised countries the guillotine was invented for people who

advanced that kind of opinion. The victim was crushed, the host was

alarmed, and the party quickly broke up. Turgenev, who disliked

extremes, and detested scenes, loved and respected Belinsky for

precisely this social fearlessness that he himself conspicuously lacked.

With his friends Belinsky played cards, cracked commonplace

jokes, talked through the night, and charmed and exhausted them all.

He could not bear solitude. He was married unsuitably, from sheer

misery and loneliness. He died of consumption in the early summer

of 1 848. The head of the gendarmerie later expressed fierce regret

that Belinsky had died, adding: 'We would have rotted him in a

fortress.' He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his death,

and at the height of his powers.

For all the external monotony of his days, Belinsky lived a life of

abnormal intensity, punctuated by acute crises, intellectual and moral,

which helped to destroy him physically. The subject which he had

chosen, the subject from which he cannot be separated even in thought,

was literature, and although he was, despite his detractors' charges of

lack of authentic capacity, acutely sensitive to pure literary quality, to

the sounds and rhythms and nuances of words, to images and poetical

symbolism and the purely sensuous emotions directed towards them,

yet that was not the central factor of his life. This centre was the

influence of ideas; not merely in the intellectual or rational sense in

which ideas are judgements or theories, but in that sense which is

perhaps even more familiar, but more difficult to express, in which

ideas embody emotions as well as thoughts, inarticulate as well as

explicit attitudes to the inner and to the outer worlds. This is the

sense in which ideas are something wider and more intrinsic to the

human beings who hold them than opinions or even principles, the

sense in which ideas constitute, and indeed are, the central complex

of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world, and

may be shallow or deep, false or true, closed or open, blind or endowed

with the power of insight. This is something which is discovered in

behaviour, conscious and unconscious, in style, in gestures and actions

and minute mannerisms at least as much as in any explicit doctrine or

professions of faith. It is ideas and beliefs in this sense, as they are

manifested in the lives and works of human beings-what is sometimes

vaguely called ideology-that perpetually excited Belinsky to enthusiasm

or anxiety or loathing, and kept him in a state sometimes amounting

..

1 5 5

R U S S IAN T H INKERS

to a kind of moral frenzy. He believed what he believed very passionately, and sacrificed his entire nature to it. When he doubted he doubted no less passionately, and was prepared to pay any price for

the answers to the questions which tormented him. These questions

were, as might be supposed, about the proper relation of the individual

to himself and to other individuals, to society, about the springs of

human action and feeling, about the ends of life, but in panicular

about the imaginative work of the anist, and his moral purpose.

All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral

questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing

for its own sake. To him this meant the question of what is alone

wonh knowing, saying, doing, and, of course, fighting for-if need be,

dying for. The ideas which he found in books or in conversation were

not for him, in the first place, intrinsically interesting or delightful

or even intellectually imponant, to be examined, analysed, reflected

about in some detached and impartial fashion. Ideas were, above all,

true or false. If false, then like evil spirits to be exorcised. All books

embody ideas, even when least appearing to do so; and it is for these

that, before anything else, the critic must probe. To illustrate this I

shall give you a curious, indeed a grotesque, but nevertheless, it seems

to me, illuminating example of his method. His critics and biographers

do not mention it, since it is a trivial piece of writing. In the course

of his day-to-day journalism Belinsky pul>lished a shon review of a

Russian version of some nineteenth-century French translation of

The Yicar of Walujield. The review starts conventionally enough, but

gradually assumes an irritated and hostile tone: Belinsky does not like

Goldsmith's masterpiece because he thinks it falsifies the moral facts.

He complains that in the character of the Vicar, Goldsmith represents

apathy, placid stupidity, and incompetence as being ultimately superior

to the qualities of the fighter, the reformer, the aggressive champion of

ideas. The Vicar is represented as a simple soul, full of Christian

resignation, unpractical, and constantly deceived; and this natural

goodness and innocence, it is implied, is somehow both incompatible

with, and superior to, cleverness, intellect, action. This to Belinsky

is a deep and damnable heresy. All books embody points of view, rest

on underlying assumptions, social, psychological, and aesthetic, and

the basis on which the Yicar rests is, according to Belinsky, philistine

and false. It is a glorification of persons who are not engaged in the

struggle of life, who stand on the edge uncommitted, dlgagls, and

enter only to be bamboozled and compromised by the active and the

1 56

V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y

crooked; which leads them to material defeat but moral victory. But

this, he exclaims, is to pander to irrationalism-to the faith in 'muddling

through' clung to by the average bourgeois everywhere�and to that

extent it is a dishonest representation of cowardice as a deeper wisdom,

of failure, temporising, appeasement, as a profound understanding of

life. One may reply that this is an absurd exaggeration; and places a

ludicrously heavy burden on the shoulders of the poor Vicar. But it

illustrates the beginning of a new kind of social criticism, which

searches in literature neither for ideal 'types' of men or situations (as

the earlier German romantics had taught), nor for an ethical instrument for the direct improvement of life; but for the attitude to life of an individual author, of his milieu, or age or class. This attitude

then requires to be judged as it would be in life in the first place for

its degree of genuineness, its adequacy to its subject-matter, its depth,

its truthfulness, its ultimate motives.

'I am a litterateur,' he wrote. 'I say this with a painful and yet

proud and happy feeling. Russian literature is my life and my blood.'

And this is intended as a declaration of moral status. When the radical

writer, Vladimir Korolenko, at the beginning of this century said 'My

country is not Russia, my country is Russian literature', it is this

position that was being so demonstratively defended. Korolenko was

speaking in the name of a movement which, quite correctly, claimed

Belinsky as its founder, of a creed for which literature alone was

free from the betrayals of everyday Russian life, and alone offered a

hope of justice, freedom, truth.

Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and

death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with

the most devastating violence. He was by temperament not religious,

nor a naturalist, nor an aesthete, nor a scholar. He was a moralist,

secular and anti-clerical through and through. Religion was to him a

detestable insult to reason, theologians were charlatans, the Church a

conspiracy. He believed that objective truth was discoverable in

nature, in society, and in the hearts of men. He was not an impressionist, he was not prepared to confine himself to ethically neutral analysis, or meticulous description without bias or comment, of the

tex�ure of life or of art. This he would have thought, like Tolstoy, or

Henen, shallow, self-indulgent or frivolous, or else (if you knew the

moral truth but preferred the outer texture) deliberate and odious

cynicism. The texture was an outer integument, and if you wanted to

understand what life was really like (and therefore what it could

..

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become), you had to distinguish what is eternal and desperately

important from the the ephemeral, however attractive. It was not

enough to look at or even re-create what Virginia Woolf called the

'semi-transparent envelope' which encloses our existence from life to

death; you had to sink beneath the mere flow of life, and examine

the structure of the ocean bed, and how the winds blow and how the

tides flow, not as an end in itself (for no man may be indifferent to

his own fate), but in order to master the elements and to steer your

craft, it may be with unending suffering and heroism, it may be against

infinitely great odds, towards the goal of truth and social justice which

you in fact know to be (because this cannot be doubted) the only goal

worth seeking for its own sake. To linger on the surface, to spend

yourself in increasingly elaborate descriptions of its properties and of

your own sensations, was either moral idiocy or calculated immoral ism,

either blindness or a craven lie which would in the end destroy the

man who told it. The truth alone was beautiful and it was always

beautiful, it could never be hideous or destructive or bleak or trivial,

and it did not live in the outer appearance. It lay 'beneath' (as Schelling,

Plato, Hegel taught) and was revealed only to those who cared for

the truth alone, and was therefore not for the neutral, the detached,

the cautious, but for the morally committed, for those who were

prepared to sacrifice all they had in order to discover and vindicate the

truth, and liberate themselves and others from the illusions, conventions, and self-deceptions which blinded men about the world and their duty in it. This creed was the creed, then enunciated for the first

time, of the Russian intelligentsia, of the moral and political opposition

to autocracy, to the Orthodox Church, and to nationalism, the triple

slogan of the supporters of the regime.

Naturally, with a temperament of a Lucretius or a Beethoven,

Belinsky as a critic was, unlike his western contemporaries, neither a

classically pure connoisseur of Platonic forms like Landor, nor a

sharp, pessimistic, disillusioned observer of genius like Sainte-Beuve;

he was a moralist, painfully and hopefully sifting the chaff from the

grain. If anything seemed to him new or valuable or important or

even true, he would fly into ecstasies of enthusiasm and proclaim his

discovery to the world in hurrying, ill-written, impassioned sentences,

as if to wait might be fatal because the attention of the vacillating

public might be distracted. Moreover one must herald the truth

tumultuously, for to speak in an even voice would perhaps not indicate

its crucial importance. And in this way Belinsky, in his exuberance,

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did discover and over-praise a handful of comparatively unknown and

worthless writers and critics whose names are today justly forgotten.

But he also revealed, and for the first time, the full glory of the great

sun of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, and he discovered and

assessed at their true worth Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and

Dostoevsky, not to· mention such writers of the second rank as

Goncharov, or Grigorovich, or Koltsov. Of course Pushkin had been

recognised as a writer of genius before Belinsky had begun writing,

but it was Belinsky's eleven famous essays that established his importance, not merely as a poet of magnificent genius, but as being, in the literal sense, the creator of Russian literature, of its language, its

direction, and its place in the national life. Belinsky created the image

of Pushkin, which henceforth dominated Russian writing, as a man

who stood to literature as Peter the Great to the Russian state, the

radical reformer, the breaker of the old, the creator of the new; the

implacable enemy and the faithful child of the national tradition, as

at once the invader of hitherto remote foreign territory, and the

integrator of the deepest and most national elements of the Russian

past. With consistency and passionate conviction, Belinsky paints the

portrait of a poet who justly saw himself as a herald and a prophet,

because by his art he had made Russian society aware of itself as a

spiritual and political entity, with its appalling inner conflicts, its

anachronisms, its anomalous position among other nations, its huge

untried strength and dark and tantalising future. With a multitude

of examples he demonstrates that this was Pushkin's achievement,

and not that of his predecessors-the official trumpeters of Russia's

spirit and Russia's might- even of the most civilised and talented,

such as the epic poet Derzhavin, the admired historian Karamzin, or

his own mentor, the generous, romantic, mellifluous, always delightful

Zhukovsky.

This unique domination of literature over life, and of one man

over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a

fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied

in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer

or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever

may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognised, the work of

Belinsky and his disciples; who first saw in Pushkin the central planet,

the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling

grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and,

in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful and whimsical man, thought

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this embarrassing and spoke o f the angular and unfashionable Belinsky

as 'a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to

adore me'. He was a little frightened of him, half suspected that he

had something to say, thought of asking him to contribute to the

journal which he edited, recollected that his friends thought him

unpresentable, and successfully avoided a personal meeting.

Pushkin's snobbery, his intermittent attempts to pretend that he

was an aristocratic dilettante and not a professional man of letters at

all, touched the socially sensitive Belinsky on the raw, just as the

mask of worldly cynicism which Lermontov adopted had offended

him at their first meeting. Nevertheless, in the presence of genius

Belinsky forgot everything. He forgot Pushkin's coldness, he realised

that behind Lermontov's Byronic mask, his insulting cynicism and

desire to wound and be wounded, there was a great lyrical poet, a

serious and penetrating critic, and a tormented human being_gf great

tenderness and depth. The genius of these men had bound its spell

upon him, and it is really in terms o_0beiE;and in particular Push kin's,

art and personality that Belinsky, -whether he was aware of it or not,

tried to define his own ideas of what a creative artist is and should be.

As a critic he remained, all his life, a disciple of the great German

romantics. He sharply rejected the didactic and utilitarian doctrines of

the function of art, then enjoying a vogue among the French socialists:

'Poetry has no purpose beyond itself. It is its own end, as truth is of

knowledge, and the good of action.' Earlier in the same article he says:

The whole world, its . . . colours and sounds, all the forms of nature

and of life, can be poetical phenomena; but its essence is that which

is concealed in these appearances . • . that in them which enchants

and fascinates by the play oflife . . . [The poet] is an impressionable,

irritable organism, always active, which at the lightest touch gives

off electric sparks, suffers more painfully, savours pleasures more

fiercely than others, loves more violently, hates with more passion . . .

And again :

[Literature is] the fruit of free inspiration, of the united though not

the organised efforts of men . . . who fully express . . . the spirit of

the people . . . whose inward life they manifest . • . in its most

hidden depths and pulsations.

He rejected with passion the notion of art as a social weapon then

preached by George Sand and Pierre Leroux:

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Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet,

your works will contain them without your knowledge-they will

be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.

This is an echo of August Wilhelm Schlegel and his allies. And

from this early view Belinsky never retreated. Annenkov says that

he looked in art for an 'integral' answer to all human needs-to repair

the gaps left by other, less adequate forms of experience; that he felt

that perpetual return to the great classical works would regenerate

and ennoble the reader, that they alone would resolve-by transforming

his vision until the true relations of things were revealed -all moral

and political problems; provided always that they remained spontaneous

and self-subsistent works of art: worlds in themselves, and not the sham

structures of moral or social propaganda. Belinsky altered his opinions

often and painfully; but to the end of his days he believed that artand in particular literature-gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse-the more purely artistic the workthe clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but

always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and

unconscious, the artist was, a function without which he became

trivial and worthless, and in _the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance. None of this would have been denied by his Slavophil opponents: their disagreements lay elsewhere.

And yet, despite his historicism-common to all romantics- Belinsky

does not belong to those whose main purpose and skill consist in a

careful critical or historical analysis of artistic phenomena, in relating

a work of art or an artist to a precise social background, analysing

specific influences upon his work, examining and describing the

methods which he uses, providing psychological or historical explanations of the success or failure of the particular .effects which he achieves. Belinsky did indeed now and then perform such tasks; and

was, in effect, the first and greatest of Russian literary historians. But

he detested detail and had no bent for scrupulous scholarship; he read

unsystematically and widely; he read and read in a feverish, frantic

way until he could bear it no longer, and then he wrote. This gives

his writing an unceasing vitality, but it is scarcely the stuff of which

balanced scholarship is made. Yet his criticism of the eighteenth century

is not as blind and sweeping as his detractors have maintained. His

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work i n assigning their due place to earlier Russian writers (for

example, Tredyakovsky, Khemnitser, Lomonosov, Fonvizin and

Dmitriev), and in particular his pages on the poet Derzhavin and the

fabulist Krylov, are a model of insight and lucid judgment. And he

did kill the reputations of a number of eighteenth-century mediocrities

and imitators once and for all.

But a capacity for lasting literary verdicts is not where his genius

lay. His unique quality as a literary critic, the quality which he

possessed to a degree scarcely equalled by anyone in the west, is the

astonishing freshness and fuUness with which he reacts to any and

every literary impression, whether of style or of content, and the

passionate devotion and scruple with which he reproduces and paints

in words the vivid original character, the colour and shape, above all

the moral quality of his direct impressions. His life, his whole being,

went into the attempt to seize the essence of the literary experience

which he was at any given moment trying to convey. He had an

exceptional capacity both for understanding and for articulating, but

what distinguished him from other, at least in this respect equally

gifted, critics, Sainte-Beuve for example, or Matthew Arnold, was

that his vision was wholly direct-there is, as it were, nothing between

him and the object. Several of his contemporaries, among them

Turgenev, noted an almost physical likeness to a hawk or a falcon:

and indeed he used to pounce upon a writer like a bird of prey, and

tear him limb from limb until he had said all he had to say. His

expositions were often too prolix, the style is uneven and sometimes

tedious and involved; his education was haphazard, and his words

have little elegance and little intrinsic magic. But when he has found

himself, when he is dealing with an author worthy of him, whether

he is praising or denouncing, speaking of ideas and attitudes to life,

or of prosody and idiom, the vision is so intense, he has so much to

say, and says it in so first-hand a fashion, the experience is so vivid

and conveyed with such uncompromising and uninterrupted force,

that the effect of his words is almost as powerful and unsettling

today as it was upon his own contemporaries. He himself said that

no one could understand a poet or a thinker who did not for a time

become wholly immersed in his world, letting himself be dominated

by his outlook, identified with his emotions; who did not, in short,

try to live through the writer's experiences, beliefs, and convictions.

In this way he did in fact 'live through' the influence of Shakespeare

and Pushkin, Gogo) and George Sand, Schiller and Hegel, and as he

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changed his spiritual domicile he altered his attitude and denounced

what he had previously praised, and praised what he had previously

denounced. Later critics have accused him of being a chameleon, a

sensitive surface which reflected too much and altered too quickly,

an unreliable guide, without a permanent core of inner principle, too

impressionable, too undisciplined, vivid and eloquent, but without a

specific, firm, critical personality, without a definite approach or an

identifiable point of view. But this is unjust, and none of his contemporaries who knew him best would have begun to understand such a judgement. If ever there lived a man of rigorous, indeed overrigorous, and narrow principle, dominated all his life by a remorseless, never-ceasing, fanatical passion for the truth, unable to compromise

or adapt himself, even for a short time and superficially, to anything

which he did not wholly and utterly believe, it was Belinsky. 'If a

man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted

to his own vanity rather than to the truth,' he said. Belinsky radically

altered his opinions twice, each time after a painful crisis. On each

occasion he suffered with an intensity which Russians seem particularly

capable of conveying by the use of words, and he gave a full account

of it, principally in his letters, the most moving in the Russian language.

Those who have read them will know what I mean by the heroic

quality of his grimly undeviating, perpetually self-scrutinising honesty

of mind and feeling.

Belinsky held several intellectual positions in his life, and turned

from one to another and exhausted each to the uttermost until, with

great tormenting effort, he would liberate himself from it, to begin

the struggle over again. He arrived at no final or consistent outlook,

and the efforts by tidy-minded biographers to divide his thought into

three or more distinct 'periods', each neatly self-contained and coherent,

ignore too many facts: Belinsky is always 'relapsing' towards earlier,

'abandoned', positions; his consistency was moral, not intellectual. He

began to philosophise in the mid- I 8 30s, as a young man of twentythree, with that disgust and sense of being asphyxiated by the police state of Nicholas I which all young intellectuals with hearts and

consciences felt, and he adopted the philosophy then preacheJ by the

young Moscow philosophers, Stankevich and Bakunin, to whose

circle he belonged. Idealism was a reaction to the grim suppression

which followed the abortive Decembrist revolt in 1 825. The young

Russian intellectuals, encouraged as they were to go to Germany

rather than to Louis Philippe's dangerously fermenting France,

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returned full of German metaphysics. Life on earth, material existence,

above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant. The only

thing that mattered was the ideal life created by the spirit, the great

imaginative constructions by means of which man transcended the

frustrating material environment, freed himself from its squalor, and

identified himself with nature and with God. The history of western

Europe revealed many such sublime achievements, and it was idle

nationalistic cant to pretend that Russia had anything to put beside

this. Russian culture (so Belinsky in the I 8JOS was telling his readers)

was an artificial, imported growth, and till Pushkin arose, could not

be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and

Schiller, or even such great realistic writers as Walter Scott and (of

all writers) Fenimore Cooper. Russian folk-song and hyliny and

popular epics were more contemptible than even the second- and

third-rate imitations of French models which formed the miserable

collection of reproductions dignified under the name of national

Russian literature. As for the Slavophils, their passion for old Russian

ways and manners, for traditional Slav dress and Russian song and

dances, for archaic musical instruments, for the rigidities of Byzantine

Orthodoxy, their contrast of the spiritual depth and wealth of the

Slavs with the decadent and 'rotting' west, corrupted by superstition

and sordid materialism-this was childish vanity and delusion. What

had Byzantium given? Its direct descendants, the southern Slavs,

were among the deadest and dullest of all European nations. If all the

Montenegrins died tomorrow, Belinsky cried in one of his revic:;ws,

the world would be none the poorer. Compared to one noble voice

from the eighteenth century, one Voltaire, one Robespierre, what had

Byzantium and Russia to offer? Only the great Peter, and he belonged

to the west. As for the glorification of the meek and pious peasantthe holy fool touched with grace- Belinsky, who, unlike the Slavophils, was by birth not a nobleman or a gentleman, but the son of a sodden

small-town doctor, looked on agriculture not as romantic and ennobling,

but merely as degrading and stupefying. The Slavophils infuriated him

by talking romantic and reactionary nonsense in their attempt to arrest

scientific progress by appeals to ancient and, as often as not, nonexistent traditions. Nothing was more contemptible than false, twopence-coloured nationalism, archaic clothes, a hatred of foreigners,

and a desire to undo the great heroic work which Peter the Great had

so boldly and magnificently begun. Like the Encyclopedists of the

eighteenth century in France, whose temper his much resembled,

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V I SSARION B E L IN SKY

Belinsky at the beginning of his career (and again towards

the end of his life) believed that only an enlightened despot-by

enforcing education, technical progress, material civilisation-could

rescue the benighted, barbarous Russian nation. In a letter to a friend

written in 1 837 he writes:

Above all you should abandoq politics and guard yourself against

the influence of politics on your ways of thought. Here in Russia,

politics has no meaning, and only empty heads can have anything

to do with it . . . If each of the individuals who compose Russia

could reach perfection by means of love, Russia would be the

happiest country in the world without any politics-education, that

is the road to happiness . . .

and again (in the same letter) :

Peter is clear evidence that Russia will not develop her liberty and

her civil structure out of her own resources, but will obtain it at the

hands of her tsars as so much else. True, we do not as yet possess

rights-we are, if you like, slaves; but that is because we still need

to be slaves. Russia is an infant and needs a nurse in whose breast

there beats a heart full of love for her fledgling, and in whose hand

there is a rod ready to punish it if it is naughty. To give the child

complete liberty is to ruin it. To give Russia in her present state a

constitution is to ruin her. To our people liberty . . . simply means

licence. The liberated Russian nation would not go to a parliament,

but run to the taverns to drink, break glass, and hang the gentry

because they shave their beards and wear European clothes . . . The

hope of Russia is education, not . . . constitutions and revolutions . . .

France has had two revolutions, and as a result of them a constitution. And in this constitutional France there is far less liberty of thought than in autocratic Prussia.

and again:

Our autocracy gives us complete freedom of thought and reflection,

but limits our freedom to raise our voices and interfere in her affairs.

It allows us to import books from abroad which it forbids us to

translate or publish. And this is right and just, because what you

may know the muzhik may not; an idea which might be good for

you, might be fatal to the muzhik, who would naturally misunderstand it . . . Wine is good for adults who know what to do with it, but fatal to children, and politics is wine which in Russia may even

turn into opium . . . And so to the devil with the French. Their

influence has brought us nothing but harm. We imitated their

.,.

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literature, and killed our own . . . Germany-that i s the Jerusalem

of modern humanity.

Even the Russian nationalist school did not go so far. At a time

when even so western a thinker as Herzen, not to speak of mild

liberals such as Granovsky and Kavelin, was prepared to temporise,

and indeed to some degree shared the Slavophils' deep and sincere

feeling for the Russian tradition and older forms of life, Belinsky

would not bend. Western Europe, more particularly enlightened

despotism, was responsible for the major achiev."!ments of mankind.

There and only there were the forces of life and the critical canons

of scientific and philosophical truth, which alone made progress

possible. The Slavophils had turned their backs on this, and however

worthy their motives, they were blind and leaders of the blind, returning to the ancient slough of ignorant barbarism and weakness from which it had taken the great Peter such efforts to lift, or half-lift, his

primitive people; salvation lay in this alone. This doctrine is radical,

individualist, enlightened, and anti-democratic. Soviet authors in

search of texts to justify the progressive role of ruthless governing

elites find much to quote from Belinsky's early writings.

Meanwhile Bakunin had begun to preach Hegel to Belinsky, who

knew no German. Night after night he preached the new objectivism

to him, as he did later in Paris to Proudhon. Finally, after a fearful

inner struggle, Belinsky was converted to the new anti-individualist

faith. He had earlier toyed with the idealism of Fichte and Schelling,

as expounded by Stankevich, the effect of which had been to turn him

away from political issues altogether, as a sordid chaos of the trivial,

empirical world, a delusive curtain concealing the harmonious reality

beyond. This was now finished and done with. He moved to St

Petersburg, and under the influence of his new r�ligion wrote two

celebrated articles in I 839-40, one reviewing a poem and a work of

prose on an anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, the other a criticism

of an attack by a German Hegelian on Goethe. 'The real is the

rational,' the new doctrine had said. It was childish and shallow and

short-sighted to attack or seek to alter reality. What is, is, because it

must be. To understand it is to understand the beauty and the harmony

of everything as it falls into its own appointed time and place in

accordance with intelligible and necessary laws. Everything has its

place in the vast scheme of nature unrolling its pattern like a great

carpet of history. To criticise is only to show that you are not adjusted

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to reality and that you do not sufficiently understand it. There were

no half-measures for Belinsky. Henen tells us that once Belinsky

finally adopted a view,

he did not quail before any consequences. He would not stop at

anything, neither considerations of moral propriety, nor the opinion

of others, which tends to frighten weaker and less elemental natures.

He knew no fear, because he was strong and sincere; his conscience

was clear.

His (or Bakunin's) interpretation oi Hegel's doctrine had convinced

him that contemplation and understanding was an attitude spiritually

superior to that of active fighting: consequently he threw himself

into 'acceptance of reality' with the same frenzy of passion as that

with which only two years later he was to attack the quietists and

demand active resistance to Nicholas l's abominations.

In 1 839-40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that history

itself-the march of the inevitable forces-sanctified the actual; that

autocracy was, coming when it did, sacred ; that Russia was as it was

as part of a divine scheme marching towards an ideal goal; that the

government-the representative of power and coercion-was wiser than

its citizens; that protests against it were frivolous, wicked, and vain.

Resistance to cosmic forces is always suicidal.

Reality is a monster (he wrote to Bakunin ], armed with iron talons,

a huge mouth and huge jaws. Sooner or later she will devour everyone who resists her, who cannot live at peace with her. To be free-and instead of a terrible monster to see in her the source of

happiness-there is only one means-to know her.

And again:

I look upon reality, which I used to hold in such contempt, and

tremble with mystic joy, recognising its rationality, realising that

nothing of it may be rejected, nothing in it may be condemned or

spurned.

And in the same vein:

Schiller was . . . my personal enemy, and it was only with great

effort that I was able to prevent my hatred of him from going

beyond the bounds of such decency as I was capable of. Why this

hatred?

Because, he goes on to say, Schiller's works Die Rauber, Kabalt und

Liebe and Fiesco 'induced in me a wild hatred of the social order, in

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the name of an abstract ideal of society, cut o ff from the geographical

and historical conditions of development, built in mid-air.' This echoes,

but in a politically far more sinister form, the relatively harmless

maxims of earlier, Fichtean Idealism, when he would declare that

society is always more right than the individual, or 'The individual is

real and not a phantom only to the degree to which he is an individual

expression of the universal.'

His friends were stupefied into silence. This was nothing less than

a major betrayal by the most single-minded and most fearless of all

the radical leaders . .The shock was so painful that in Moscow it could

scarcely be discussed at all. Belinsky knew precisely what effect his

secession would cause, and said so in his letters; nevertheless he saw

no way out. He had reached his conclusion by a rational process, and

if the choice was between betraying the truth and betraying his friends,

he must be man enough to betray his friends. Indeed the thought of

the appalling pain that this would cause him somehow merely underlined the inescapable necessity of this great sacrifice to principle. This acceptance of 'the iron laws' of social development and the march of

history as being not merely inevitable but just, rational, morally

liberating, was nevenheless marked, both then and later, by a profound

disgust with the conditions of Russian society in general and of his

own society in panicular.

Our life (he wrote to Konstantin Aksakov in I 840 ], what

sort of life is it to be? Where is it and what is it about? We are

so many individuals outside a society, because Russia is not a

society. We possess neither a political nor a religious nor a scientific

nor a literary life. Boredom, apathy, frustration, fruitless effortsthat is our life . . . China is a disgusting state, but more disgusting is a state which possessed rich materials for life but which is held in

an iron frame like a rickety child.

And the remedy? Conformity to the powers that be: adjustment

to 'reality'. Like many a communist of a later date Belinsky gloried

in the very weight of the chains with which he had chosen to bind

his limbs, in the very narrowness and darkness which he had willed

to suffer; the sl.ock and disgust of his friends was itself evidence of the

vastness, and therefore of the grandeur and the moral necessity, of the

sacrifice. There is no ecstasy to compare to that of self-immolation.

This condition lasted for a year, and then he could bear it no longer.

Herzen paid a visit to him in St Petersburg; it had begun in a frigid

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and awkward manner, and then in a great burst of emotion Belinsky

broke down, and admitted that the Hegelian year, with its wilful

'acceptance' and glorification of the black reaction of the regime, was

a heavy nightmare, an offering upon the altar not of truth but of an

insane logical consistency. What he cared about, what he had never

ceased to care about, was not the historical process or the condition

of the universe or the solemn march of the Hegelian God through

the world, but the lives and liberties and aspirations of individual men

and women whose sufferings no sublime universal harmony could

explain away or redeem. From that moment he never looked back.

The relief was immense:

I abominate [he wrote to Botkin] my contemptible desire to reconcile myself with a contemptible reality ! Long live the great Schiller, noble advocate of humanity, bright star of salvation, the emancipator of society from the blood-stained prejudices of tradition ! 'Long live reason, and may the darkness perish' as great Pushkin used to

exclaim ! The human personality is now above history, above society,

above humanity for me . . . good Lord, it frightens me to think of

what must have been happening to me-fever, madness- I feel like

a convalescent now . . . I will not make my peace or adjust myself

to vile realities. I look for happiness only in the world of fancy,

only fantasies make me happy. As for reality- reality is an executioner . . .

I am tormented by the thought of the pleasures I have let go

because of the contemptible idealism and feebleness of my character.

God knows what vile, revolting nonsense I have talked in print,

with all the sincerity and fanaticism of deep, wild conviction . . •

What horrible zigzags my path towards truth seems to involve;

what a terrible price I have had to pay, what fearful blunders I

have had to commit for the sake of truth, and what a bitter truth it

is-how vile the world is, especially in our neighbourhood.

And in the same year:

And oh the mad nonsense which I have poured out . . . against the

French, that energetic and noble nation, shedding its blood for the

most sacred rights of mankind . . . I have awoken and recollect my

dreams with horror . . .

And apropos the inexorable march of the Spirit (Herzen records) :

So it is not for myself that I create, but for the Spirit . . . Really what

kind of an idiot does it take me for? I'd rather not think at allwhat do I care about Its consciousness?

R U SS IAN T H INKERS

And in his letters there are passages in which such sacred metaphysical

entities as Universality- Cosmic Consciousness-the Spirit-the rational

State etc. are denounced as a Moloch of abstraction devouring living

human beings.

A year later he finally settled accounts with the master himself:

All Hegel's talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the

objective realm of thought there is no morality . . . Even if I

attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development, I

should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the

victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself off head-downwards . . . I am told

that disharmony is a condition of harmony. This may be found

agreeable . . . by musical persons, but is not quite so satisfactory

from the point of view of those whose fate it is to express in their

lives the element of disharmony.

And in the same year he tries to explain the aberration:

. . . because we understood that for us there is no life in real life, and

because our nature was such that without life we could not live, we

ran away into the world of books, and began to live and to love

according to books, and made life and love a kind of occupation, a

kind of work, an anxious labour . . . In the end we bored and

irritated and maddened each other . . .

Be social or die ! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that solitary genius should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the

mud? What is it to me if I do apprehend . . . the essence of art or

religion or history, if I cannot share this with all those who should

be my human brothers, my brethren in Christ, but are in fact

strangers and enemies because of their ignorance? . . . I cannot bear

the sight of barefoot boys playing . . . in the gutter, poor men in

tatters, the drunken cab-driver, the soldier coming off duty, the

official padding along with a portfolio under his arm, the selfsatisfied army officer, the haughty nobleman. When I give a penny to a soldier or a beggar I almost cry, I run from him as if I had done

something terrible, as if I did not wish to hear the sound of my own

steps . . . Has a man the right to forget himself in art or science,

while this goes on?

He read the materialist Feuerbach and became a revolutionary

democrat, denouncing tyranny, ignorance, and the bestial lives of his

fellow countrymen with ever-increasing ferocity. After his escape

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V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y

from the spell of a half-understood German metaphysics he felt a

sense of extreme liberation. As always the reaction took an external

form and poured itself out i n passionate paeans to individualism. In a

letter to his friend Botkin he denounced his intellectual milieu for its

lack of seriousness and personal dignity:

. . . we are the unhappy Anarcharsises of the new Scythia. Why do

we all gape, yawn, bustle, and hurry and take an interest in everything and stick to nothing, and consume everything and remain hungry? We love one another, we love warmly and deeply, and how

have we shown our friendship? We used to be tremendously excited

about one another, enthusiastic, ecstatic, we hated one another, we

wondered about each other, we despised one another . . . When

separated from each other for long we pined and wept salt tears at

the mere thought of meeting, we were sick with love and affection :

when we met, our meetings were cold and oppressive, and we would

separate without regret. That is how it was, and it is time that we

stopped deceiving ourselves . . . Our learned professors are pedants,

a mass of social corruption . . . We are orphans, men without a

country . . . The ancient world is enchanting . . . its life contains

the seed of everything that is great, noble, valiant, because the

foundation of its life is personal pride; the dignity and sanctity of

the individual.

There follows an ecstatic comparison of Schiller to Tiberi us Gracchus

and of himself to Marat.

The human personality has become the point on which I fear I will

go off my head. I am beginning to love mankind a Ia Marat: to

make the smallest ponion of it happy I am ready, I do believe, to

destroy the rest by lire and sword.

He loves only the Jacobins-only they are effective: 'The two-edged

sword of word and deed-the Robespierres and the St Justs . . . not . . .

the sugary and ecstatic turns of phrase, the pretty idealism of the

Gironde', and this leads to socialism-of that pre-Marxist, 'Utopian'

kind, which Belinsky embraced before he understood it, because of

its promise of equality:

• . . socialism . . . idea of ideas, essence of essences . . • the alpha and

omega of faith and science. The day will come when nobody will

be burnt alive, nobody will have his head chopped off . . . There

will be no rich, no poor, no kings and subjects . . . [men] will be

brothers • . .

..

1 7 1

R U S·SIAN T H I N K E R S

I t i s this mystical vision that Dostoevsky had i n mind when a

good many years after Belinsky's death he said: 'He believed . . . that

socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of the individual

personality but, on the contrary, restores it to unheard-of splendour,

on new and this time adamantine foundations.' Belinsky was the first

man to tell Dostoevsky, then still young and obscure, that in his Poor

Folk he had done in one stroke what the critics vainly tried to do in

lengthy essays-he had revealed the life of the grey, humiliated,

Russian minor official as nobody had even done before; but he disliked

Dostoevsky personally and detested his Christian convictions, and

deliberately scandalised him by violent atheistic and blasphemous

tirades. His attitude to religion was that of Holbach or Diderot, and

for the same reasons: 'in the words God and rtligion I see only black

darkness, chains and the knout'.

In 1 847 Gogo!, whose genius Belinsky had acclaimed, published a

violently anti-liberal and anti-western tract, calling for a return to

ancient patriarchal ways, a spiritually regenerated land of serfs, landlords, the tsar. The cup brimmed over. In a letter written from abroad Belinsky, in the last stages of his wasting disease, accused Gogo!

of betraying the light:

. . . one cannot be silent when, under cover of religion, backed by

the whip, falsehood and immorality are preached as truth and virtue.

Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man tied by ties

of blood to his country loves its hope, its glory, its pride, one of its

great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and

progress . . . Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, or aestheticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation, and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too

many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of

the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for

so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance

not with the teachings of the church, but with those of common

sense and justice . . . Instead of which she offers the terrible

spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even

the cant of the Americans, who say that negroes are not men . . . a

country where there are no guarantees of personal libeny or honour

or property; not even a police state, only huge corporations of

official thieves and robbers . . . The government . . . knows well

what the landlords do to their peasants, and how many landlords

are massacred by their serfs every year . . . Preacher of the whip,

apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and black reaction,

1 72.

V I S SA R I ON B E L I N SK Y

defender of a Tartar way of life-what are you doing? Look at the

ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss.

You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I

understand, for the Church has always favoured whips and prisons,

it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with

Christ? . . . Of course a Voltaire whose ridicule put out the flames

of fanaticism and illiteracy in Europe is far more a son of Christ,

flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone, than all your parsons,

bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans . . . [Our country priests] are the

heroes of rude, popular tales . . . the priest is always the glutton, the

miser, the sycophant, the man lost to all sense of shame . . . Most

of our clergy are . . . either pedantic schoolmen, or else appallingly

ignorant and blind. Only our literature, in spite of a barbarous

censorship, shows signs of life and forward movement. That is why

the calling of the writer is so honoured among us, why even a

small literary gift makes for success; that is why the profession of

letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy

uniforms; that is why a liberal writer, even one whose capacity is

poor, excites general attention, while great poets who . . . sell their

gifts to serve the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism,

quickly lose their popularity . . . The Russian people is right. It

sees in writers of Russia its only leaders, defenders, and saviours

from the darkness of Russian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism.

It can forgive a bad book but not a harmful one.

He read this letter to his friends in Paris. 'This is a work of genius,'

Herun said in a low voice to Annenkov, who records the scene, 'and

I think his last will and testament. • This celebrated document became

the bible of Russian revolutionaries. Indeed it is for reading it to an

illicit discussion circle that Dostoevsky was condemned to death, then

sent to Siberia.

Belinsky in his final phase was a humanist, an enemy of theology

and metaphysics, and a radical democrat, and by the extreme force

and vehemence of his convictions turned purely literary disputes into

the beginnings of social and political movements. Turgenev said of

him that there are tWo types of writer: a writer may be brilliantly

imaginative and creative, but remain on the periphery of the collective

experience of the society to which he belongs. Or he may live at the

centre of his society, being connected 'organically' with the emotions

and state of mind of his community. Belinsky knew, as only true

social critics do, where the centre of moral gravity of a book, an

opinion, an author, a movement, an entire society, could be found.

,,

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The central issue o f Russian society was not political but social and

moral. The intelligent and awakened Russian wanted above all to be

told what to do, how to live as an individual, as a private person.

Turgenev testifies that never were people more interested in the

problems of life, and never less in those of pure aesthetic theory, than

in the 1 84os and 50s. The mounting repression made literature the

only medium within which any degree of free discussion of social

questions could take place. I ndeed the great controversy between

Slavophils and 'Westerners', between the view of Russia as a still

uncorrupted spiritual and social organism, bound by impalpable links

of common love, natural piety, and reverence for authority, to which

the application of artificial, 'soulless' western forms and institutions

had done, and would do, fearful damage; and, on the other hand, the

view of it held by the 'Westerners' as a retarded semi-Asiatic despotism

lacking even the rudiments of social justice and individual liberty-this

crucial debate, which split educated Russians in the nineteenth century,

was c.arried on principally in the semi-disguise of literary and philosophical argument. The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some j ustice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue

as in itself a menace to the regime. Nevertheless the effective techniques of suppression, as we know them now, had not as yet been i nvented; and the half-clandestine controversy continued, sharpened

and rendered more personal by the acute consciousness of their own

social origins which infected the opinions and quality of feeling of the

principal adversaries themselves.

Russia in Belinsky's day, in the I 8JOS and the 1 840s, was still, in

the main, a feudal society. It was pre-industrial and, in certain parts

of it, semi-colonial. The state was based on sharply drawn divisions

which separated the peasantry from the merchants and from the lower

clergy, and there was a still wider gap which divided the gentry from

the nobility. It was not altogether impossible, although it was very

difficult and very uncommon, to rise from a lower to a higher stratum.

But in order to do this a man had to have not merely exceptional

energy, exceptional ambition and talent, but also a certain willingness

and capacity to jettison his past and to identify himself morally,

socially, and mentally with the higher milieu, which on certain terms,

if he tried hard enough, might be prepared to receive and assimilate

him. The most remarkable Russian in the eighteenth century, the

father of polite letters and of the natural sciences in his country,

Mikhail Lomonosov -'the Russian Leonardo'- was1a man of obscure

V I S SARION B E L I N SKY

and humble origin, but he rose and was transformed. There is a good

deal that is robust and vigorous, but nothing primitive, no trace of a

rustic accent in his writing. He had all the zeal of a convert and a

self-taught one at that, and did more than anyone to establish the

formal conventions of Russian literary prose and verse in the later

eighteenth century, rigorously modelled on the most elaborate European-that is to say French -practice of the time. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century the social elite alone possessed

enough education, leisure, and trained taste to pursue the fine arts,

and in particular literature: they looked to the mandarins of the west,

and borrowed little-at most here and there a touch of local colourfrom the traditional arts and crafts still practised with skill and imagination by peasants and artisans in forgotten corners of the great

empire. Literature was an elegant accomplishment and was practised

largely by aristocratic dilettanti and their proteges in St Petersburg,

and to a lesser extent in Moscow- the first the seat of the government,

the second the home of wealthy merchants and of the more solid and

old-fashioned nobility, who looked with distaste on the chilly and

sophisticated atmosphere of the Europeanised capital. The most

characteristic names in the first generation of the great literary

renaissance-Karamzin and Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Griboedov,

Baratynsky and Venevitinov, Vyazemsky and Shakhovskoy, Ryleev

and both Odoevskys- belong to this social stratum. A few individuals

from outside were, indeed, permitted to enter: the critic and journalist

Polevoy, the pioneer of literary naturalism in Russia, was the son of

a merchant in Siberia; the lyrical poet Koltsov was a peasant to the

end of his days. But such exceptions did not greatly affect the established literary hierarchy. The socially humble Polevoy, after beginning bravely enough as a frondeur against the elite, gradually assimilated

himself completely to the style and methods of the dominant group,

and ended his life (it is true, after persecution by the authorities) as a

tame and frightened supporter of the Orthodox Church and the autocratic government. Koltsov, who retained his country idiom to the end, achieved fame precisely as such -as a primitive of genius, the simple

peasant unspoilt by fame who charmed the sophisticated ulons by

the freshness and spontaneity of his gifts, and touched his well-born

admirers by the almost exaggerated humility of his manner, and by

his unhappy and self-effacing life.

Belinsky broke this tradition and broke it for ever. This he did

because he entered the company of his social superiors on his own

..

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

terms-without surrendering anything. H e was an uncouth provincial

when he arrived in Moscow, and he retained many of the tastes,

prejudices, and habits of his class to the end of his life. He was born

in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of

an obscure country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to

some degree, soften and civilise him, but there remained to the end

a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious, rough, sometimes aggressive

tone in his writing. This tone enters Russian literature, never to

leave it. Throughout the nineteenth century it is the distinguishing

characteristic of the political radicals impatient of the urbanity of the

non-political or conservative intelligentsia. As the revolutionary movement grew in intensity, this note becomes by turns strident and violent, or muted and ominous. Its use gradually became a matter of principle:

a weapon deliberately employed by the intellectual sans-culottts against

the supporters of the established order, the rude and defiant tone of

the leaders of the underprivileged and oppressed, determined to do

away once and for all with the polite fictions which merely conceal

the deadness, futility, and above all the heartless wickedness of the

prevailing system. Belinsky spoke with this accent because this kind

of harshness was natural to him, because he was widely-read but halfeducated, violently emotional, and unrestrained by conventional breeding or a naturally moderate temper, liable to storms of moral

indignation, constantly boiling and protesting and crying out against

iniquity or falsehood without regard to time or place or company.

His followers adopted his manner because they were the party of the

tnragls, and this became the traditional accent of the new truth which

had to be spoken with anger, with a sense of freshly suffered insult.

In this sense the real heir of Belinsky is the 'nihilist' Bazarov in

Turgenev's Fathers and Children. When the cultivated but insufferable uncfe in that novel, who stands for elegant manners and Pushkin and an aesthetic view of life (with which Turgenev himself feels to

some degree identified, although not without a sense of guilt), enquires

why the dissection of frogs and the other sordid paraphernalia of

modern anatomy should be regarded as so supremely interesting or

important, Bazarov replies with deliberate harshness and arrogance

that this is so because they are 'true'. This kind of violent houtade,

asserting the primacy of the material facts of life and nature, became

the o�cial battle cry of the rebellious section of the intelligentsia,

and it became a duty not merely to tell the unpalatable truth but to

say it as loudly, as harshly, as disagreeably as possible, to trample with

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V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y

excessive brutality upon the delicate aesthetic values of the older

generation, to employ shock tactics. The enemy was numerous,

powerful, and well-entrenched, and therefore the cause of truth could

not triumph without wholesale destruction of his defence works, however valuable or attractive they might be in themselves. Belinsky did not himself develop this attitude to its fullest and most destructive

extent, although Bakunin had begun to do so in his lifetime; he was

too sensitive to artistic experience as such, too deeply under the spell

of literary genius, whether it arne from a radial or a reactionary

source, and too honest to practise ruthlessness for its own sake. But the

unbending, puritanical attitude to the truth, and particularly the

passion for the seamy, the unmentionable side of everything, the

insistence on asserting it at whatever cost, at whatever sacrifice of

literary or social amenities, and consequently a certain exaggerated

emphasis on angular, blunt, unambiguous terms calculated to provoke

some kind of sharp reaction-that came from him and him alone, and

it altered the style and content of the great political and artistic controversies of the hundred years and more since his death.

In the polite, elegant, spirited, gay, socially accomplished society

of the intellectuals of Moscow and Petersburg he continued to speak,

indeed at times to shout, in his own dissonant idiom, and remained

independent, violent, maladjusted, and, indeed, what later came to be

called 'class-conscious', to the end of his days; and he was felt to be

a profoundly disturbing figure for precisely this reason, an unassimilable outsider, a dervish, a moral fanatic, a man whose unbridled behaviour threatened the accepted conventions upon which a civilised

literary and artistic world rested. He secured this independence at a

cost; he over-developed the harsher side of his nature, and sometimes

ftung off needlessly crude judgments, he was too intolerant of refinement and fastidiousness as such, too suspicious of the merely beautiful, and was sometimes artistically and morally blinded by the violence of

his own moral dogmatism. But his individuality was so strong, the

power of his words so great, his motives so pure and so intense, that

(as I said before) the very roughness and clumsiness of his style created

its own tradition of literary sincerity. This tradition of protest and

revolt is of a quality wholly different from that of the well-born and

well-bred radicals of the 1 84os who shook and in the end destroyed

the classical aristocratic fa�e of the 'Augustan age' of Russian

literature. The circle-or the two overlapping circles-in which he

moved, in his day still consisted principally of the sons of land-owning

,,

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

squires. But i n due course this aristocratic opposition gave way to

more violent figures drawn from the middle class and the proletariat.

Of these latter Belinsky is the greatest and most direct ancestor.

Those left-wing writers of a later day inevitably tended to imitate

the defects of his qualities, and in particular the brutal directness and

carelessness of his diction as a measure of their own contempt for the

careful and often exquisite taste of the polite belles lettres against which

they were in such hot rebellion. But whereas the literary crudities of

such radical critics of the 6os as Chernyshevsky or Pisarev were

deliberate-a conscious weapon in the war for ;naterialism and the

natural sciences, and against the ideals of pure art, refinement, and the

cultivation of aesthetic, non-utilitarian attitudes to personal and social

questions- Belinsky's case is more painful and more interesting. He

was not a crude materialist, and certainly not a utilitarian. He believed

in his critical calling as an end valuable in itself. He wrote as he spokein shapeless, over-long, awkward, hurrying, tangled sentences-only because he possessed no better means of expression; because that was

the natural medium in which he felt and thought.

Let me remind you once again that Russian writing for several

decades, before and after Push kin, practised, as it was, almost exclusively

by the 'awakened' members of the upper and upper middle class, drew

on foreign, principally French and later German, sources, and was

marked with an altogether exceptional sensibility to style and subtlety

of feeling. Belinsky's preoccupations, for all his insight into the process

of artistic creation, were predominantly social and moral. He was a

preacher, he preached with fervour, and could not always control the

tone and accent of his utterance. He wrote, as he spoke, with a grating,

occasionally shrill intonation, and Pushkin's friends-aesthetes and

mandarins- instinctively recoiled from this noisy, frantically excited,

half-educated vulgarian. Belinsky, whose admiration of their magnificent achievement was wholehearted and boundless, felt (as so often) wounded and socially humiliated. But he could not alter his

nature, nor could he alter or modify or pass over the truth as he saw_

it, painfully, but, from time to time, with overwhelming clearness.

His pride was great, and he was dedicated to a cause; the cause was

that of the unadorned truth, and in her service he would live and die.

The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, the Arz.amas group as

they were called, despite radical ideas acquired abroad in the victorious

war against Napoleon, despite the Decembrist interlude, was on the

whole conservative, if not always politically, yet in social habits and

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V I S S A R I O N B E L I N S K Y

temper; it was connected with the Court and the Army and deeply

patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, a sin

against the light of science and education, was convinced that Russia

had more to learn from the technologically progressive west than to

teach it, that the Slavophil movement was a romantic illusion, and,

in its extreme form, blind nationalistic megalomania, that western arts

and sciences and forms of civilised life offered the first and only hope

of lifting Russia from her backward state. Herzen, Bakunin, Granovsky believed this too, of course. But then they had had a semi-western education, and found it both easy and agreeable to travel and live

abroad and to enter into social and personal relations with civilised

Frenchmen or Germans. Even the Slavophils who spoke of the west

as worthless and decadent were delighted by their visits to Berlin or

Baden-Baden or Oxford or even Paris itself.

Belinsky, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was

emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecutionridden abroad. He found western culture worthy of respect and emulation, but western habits of life were to him personally quite

insufferable. He began to sigh bitterly for home as soon as he had

left his native shore on a sea voyage to Germany; the Sistine Madonna

and the wonders of Paris did not comfort him; after a month abroad he

was almost insane with nostalgia. In a very real sense he embodied

the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life

to a sharper degree than his friends and contemporaries-whether like

Turgenev they felt contented in Germany and Paris and unhappy in

Russia, or, like the Slavophils, wore traditional Russian dress and

secretly preferred a poem by Goethe or a tragedy by Schiller to any

number of ancit:nt Russian ballads or Slav chronicles. T:1is deep inner

conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost

physical, needs, is a characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth

century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became

sharper and more articulate, the contradiction, which tormented

Belinsky, emerged more clearly. The Marxists or agrarian socialists

or anarchists, when they are not noblemen or university professors,

that is to say, to some degree professionally members of an international society, make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the west in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all

its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when

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they are forced to emigrate, find life abroad more agonising than other

exiles. Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Lavrov were by birth gentlemen,

and lived abroad, if not happily, at any rate without becoming embittered specifically by contact with it. Herz.en did not greatly love Switzerland and he disliked Twickenham and London a great deal,

but he preferred either to St Petersburg under Nicholas I, and he was

happy in the society of his French and Italian friends. Turgenev

seemed more than contented on Madame Viardot's estate at Bougival.

But Belinsky can no more be thought of as a voluntary emigre than

Dr Johnson or Cobbett. He stormed and ranted and denounced the

most sacrosanct Russian institutions, but he did not leave his country.

And although he must have known that imprisonment and slow and

painful death were inevitable if he persisted, he did not, and obviously

could not for a moment, contemplate emigrating beyond the frontiers

of the Russian Empire: the Slavophils and the reactionaries were the

enemy, but the battle could be fought only on native soil. He could

not be silent and he would not go abroad. His head was with the west,

but his heart and his ill-kept body were with the mass of inarticulate

peasants and small traders-the 'poor folk' of Dostoevsky, the inhabitants of the teeming world of Gogol's terrible comic imagination.

Speaking of the Westerners' attitude to the Slavophils, Herz.en said :

Yes, we were their opponents, but very peculiar ones. We had only

ont love, but it did not takt tht samt form.

From our earliest years, we were possessed by one powerful,

unaccountable, physiological, passionate feeling, which they took

for memory of the past, we for a vision of the future-a feeling of

love, limitless, embracing all our being, love for the Russian people,

the Russian way of life, the Russian type of mind. We, like Janus

or the double-headed eagle, looked in opposite directions, while ont

htart beat in us all.

Belinsky was not torn between incompatible ideals. He was an

integrated personality in the sense that he believed in his own feelings,

and was therefore free from the self-pity and the sentimentality which

spring from indulgence in feelings which one does not respect in

oneself. But there was a division within him which arose from a

simultaneous admiration for western values and ideals, and a profound

lack of sympathy with, indeed dislike and lack of respect for, the

characters and form of life of the western bourgeoisie and typical

western intellectuals. This ambivalence of feeling, created by history-

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V I SSARION B E L I N SKY

by the social and psychological conditions, which formed the Russian

intellectuals in the nineteenth century- was inherited by and became

prominent in the next generation of radical intellectuals- in Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov, in the populist movement, in the assassins of Alexander II, and indeed in Lenin too, Lenin who could not be

accused of ignoring or despising the contributions of western culture,

but felt far more alien in London or Paris than the more 'normal'

type of international exile. To some degree this peculiar amalgam of

love and hate is still intrinsic to Russian feelings about Europe: on

the one hand, intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate

and excel; on the other, emotional hostility, suspicion, and contempt, a

sense of being clumsy, dt trop, of being outsiders; leading, as a result,

to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and

aggressive flouting of, western values. No visitor to the Soviet Union

can have failed to remark something of this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the west as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient, and successful :

but also as being cramped, cold, mean, calculating, and fenced in,

without capacity for large views or generous emotion, for feeling which

must, at times, rise too high and overflow its banks, for heedless selfabandonment in response to some unique historical challenge, and consequently condemned never to know a rich flowering of life.

This spontaneity of feeling and passionate idealism are in themselves sufficient to distinguish Belinsky from his more methodical disciples. Unlike later radicals, he was not himself a utilitarian, least

of all where art was concerned. Towards the end of his life he pleaded

for a wider application of science, and more direct expression in art.

But he never believed that it was the duty of the artist to prophesy

or to preach- to serve society directly by telling it what to do, by

providing slogans, by putting its art in the service of a specific programme. This was the view of Chernyshevsky and N ekrasov in the sixties; of Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky and Soviet critics today.

Belinsky, like Gorky, believed in the duty of the artist to tell the

truth as he alone, being uniquely qualified to see and to utter, sees it

and can say it; that this is the whole duty of a writer whether he be a

thinker or an artist. Moreover he believed that since man lives in

society, and is largely made by society, this truth must necessarily be

largely social, and that, for this reason, all forms of insulation and

escape from environment must, to that degree, be falsifications of

the truth, and treason to it. For him the man and the artist and the

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

citizen are one; and whether you write a novel, o r a poem, or a work

of history or philosophy, or an article in a newspaper, or compose a

symphony or a picture, you are, or should be, expressing the whole

of your nature, not merely a professionally trained part of it, and you

are morally responsible as a man for what you do as an artist. You

must always bear witness to the truth, which is one and indivisible,

in every act and in every word. There are no purely aesthetic truths

or aesthetic canons. Truth, beauty, morality, are attributes of life and

cannot be abstracted from it, and what is intellectually false or morally

ugly cannot be artistically beautiful, or vice versa. He believed that

human existence was-or should be -a perpetual and desperate war

between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, in which no man

had the right to be neutral or have relations with the enemy, least of

all the artist. He declared war on the official nationalists because they

suppressed and distorted or coloured the facts: and this was thought

unpatriotic. He denounced copybook sentiments, and with a certain

brutality of expression tried to formulate the crude truth behind them,

and that was thought cynical. He admired first the German romantics,

then only their radical wing, and then the French socialists, and was

thought subversive. He told the Slavophils that inner self-improvement

and spiritual regeneration cannot occur on an empty stomach, nor in

a society which lacks social justice and suppresses elementary rights,

and this was thought materialistic.

His life and personality became a myth. He lived as an idealised,

severe, and morally immaculate figure in the hearts of so many of

his contemporaries that, after mention of his name was once again

tolerated by the authorities, they vied with each other in composing

glowing epitaphs to his memory. He established the relation of literature to life in a manner which even writers not at all sympathetic to his point of view, such as Leskov and Goncharov and Turgenev, all

of whom in some sense pursued the ideal of pure art, were forced to

recognise ; they might reject his doctrine, but they were forced by

the power of his invisible presence into having to settle accounts with

him-if they did not, like Dostoevsky or Gogo!, follow him, they at

least felt it necessary to explain themselves on this matter. No one felt

this need more acutely than Turgenev. Pulled one way by Flaubert,

another by the awful apparition of his dead friend which perpetually

arose before him, Turgenev vainly tried to placate both, and so spent

much of his life in persuading himself and his Russian public that his

position was not morally indefensible, and involved no betrayals or

1 8:1

V I SSA R I ON B E L I N S K Y

evasions. This search for one's proper place in the moral and the

social universe continued as a central tradition in Russian literature

virtually until the revolt in the 1 89os of the neo-classicist aesthetes

and the symbolists under Ivanov and Balmont, Annensky and Blok.

But these movements, splendid as their fruit was, did not last long as

an effective force. And the Soviet revolution returned, albeit in a

crude and distorted utilitarian form, to the canons of Belinsky and the

social criteria of art.

Many things have been said against Belinsky, particularly by the

opponents of naturalism, and some of them it is difficult to deny. He

was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity

do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared

that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of

Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age; that

Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila was 'infantile', that his Tales

of Belkin and Fairy Tales were worthless, and Tatyana in Evgeny

One gin 'a moral embryo'. There are equally wild remarks about

Racine and Corneille and Balzac and Hugo. Some of these are due

to irritation caused by the pseudo-medievalism of the Slavophils,

some to an over-sharp reaction against his old master Nadezhdin and

his school, which laid down that it was inartistic to deal with what

is dark or ugly or monstrous, when life and nature contain so much

that is beautiful and harmonious; but it is mostly due to sheer critical

blindness. He did damn the magnificent poet Baratynsky _out of hand,

and erased a gifted minor contemporary of Pushkin-the lyrical poet

Benediktov-out of men's minds for half a century, for no better

reason than that he disliked mere delicacy without moral fervour. And

he began to think that he was mistaken in proclaiming the genius

of Dostoevsky, who was perhaps no more than an exasperating

religious neurotic with persecution mania. His criticism is very uneven.

His essays in artistic theory, despite good pages, seem arid and artificial

and conceived under the inAuence of Procrustean German systems,

alien to his concrete, impulsive, and direct sense of life and art. He

wrote and talked a very great deal, and said far too much about too

many unrelated things, and too often spoke incoherently and naively,

with the uncritical exaggeration and half-baked dogmatism of an

autodidact-'always in a dither of excitement, always frantic, always

hurrying', falling and rising and stumbling on, sometimes pathetically

ill-equipped, hurrying desperately wherever the battle between truth

and falsehood, life and death, seemed most critical. He was the more

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

erratic because h e took pride i n what seemed to him freedom from

petty qualities, from neatness and tidiness and scholarly accuracy, from

careful judgement and knowing how far to go. He could not bear

the cautious, the morally timid, the intellectually genteel, the avoiders

of crises, the bien pensant seekers of compromise, and attacked them

in long and clumsy periods full of fury and contempt. Perhaps he was

too intolerant, and morally lop-sided, and overplayed his own feelings.

He need not, perhaps, have hated Goethe quite so much for his, to

him, maddening serenity, or the whole of Polish literature for being

Polish and in love with itself. And these are not accidental blemishes,

they are the defects inherent in everything that he is and stands for.

To dislike them overmuch is ultimately to condemn his positive

attitude too. The value and influence of his position reside precisely

in his lack of, and conscious opposition to, artistic detachment: for he

saw in literature the expression of everything that men have felt and

thought and have had to say about life and society, their central

attitude to man's situation and to the world, the justification of their

whole life and activity, and consequently looked on it with the deepest

possible concern. He abandoned no view, however eccentric, until he

had tried it out on himself as it were, until he had 'lived himself'

through it, and paid the price in nervous waste and a sense of inadequacy, and sometimes total failure. He put truth, however fitfully glimpsed, however dull or bleak it might turn out to be, so far above

other aims that he communicated a sense of its sanctity to others and

thereby transformed the standards of criticism in Russia.

Because his consuming passion was confined to literature and books,

he attached immense importance to the appearance of new ideas, new

literary methods, above all new concepts of the relation of literature

and life. Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was

living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling

in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering,

and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook

of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered

the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression

of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant

social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic. Every

age has its official preachers and prophets who castigate its vices and

call to a better life. Yet it is not by them that ia; deepest malaise is

revealed, but in the artists and thinkers dedicated to the more painful

and difficult task of creation, description and analysis-it is they, the

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V I SSARION B E L IN S K Y

poets, the novelists, the critics, who live through the moral agony

of their society in their own personal experience; and it is they, their

victories and their defeats, that affect the fate of their generation and

leave the most authentic testimony of the battle itself for the benefit

of interested posterity. Nekrasov w.as a very gifted poet, but before

everything he was a preacher and a propagandist of genius; consequently it was not he but Belinsky who first saw the central issue and saw it more clearly and directly and simply than anyone would ever

see it again. Nor did the thought ever seem to arise in his mind that

it might be possible not to face it with all its implications, to practise

caution, to be more circumspect in one's choice of a moral and

political position, or perhaps even to retire to a neutral and disinterested

attitude above the din of the battle. 'He knew no fear, because he was

strong and sincere; his conscience was clear.' It is because he committed himself so violently and irrevocably to a very specific vision of the truth, and to a very specific set of moral principles to govern both

thought and action, at a price which grew greater continually to

himself and those who chose to follow him, that his life and his outlook

alternately appalled and inspired the generation which came after him.

No final verdict had been declared upon him in his own lifetime. Not

even official canonisation in his native country has finally laid the

ghost of his doubts and torments or stilled his indignant voice. The

issues on which he spent his life are today more alive-and, in consequence of revolutionary forces which he himself did so much to set in motion, more pressing and more threatening-than ever before .

..

IV

A L E X A N D E R H E R Z E N

A L E XA N D E R H E R Z E N is the most arresting Russian political writer

in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps

because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is

not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good

reason, for it has been translated into English, the first part magnificently by J. D. Duff, and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even

in translation, marvellously readable.

In some respects, it resembles Goethe"s Dichtung und Wahrheit

more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal

memoirs and political reRections. It is an amalgam of personal detail,

descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions,

personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of I 848

and I 849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents

about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and

of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed

with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous,

occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of

peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams

about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own

hopes and fears for Russia; and interwoven with this is a detailed and

poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most

extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious

man ever written down for the benefit of the general public.

Alexander I vanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in I 8 I 2, not

long before the capture of the city by Napoleon, the illegitimate son

of I van Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended

from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive,

distinguished and civilised man, who bullied his son, loved him deeply,

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A L E X AN D E R H E RZEN

embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by

attraction and repulsion. His mother, Luiz� Haag, was a mild

German lady from Stuttgart in Wurttemberg, the daughter of a minor

official. I van Y akovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but

never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress

of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of

the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born

and therefore not entitled to bear his name.

The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a

considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more

rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular

education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of

Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive

character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this)

into the generation of what in Russia came to be called /ishnie lyudi,

'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely

concerned.

These young men have a place of their own in the history of

European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the

class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go

over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.

There is something singularly attractive about men who retained,

throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and

style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar

kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction.

Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a

unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic ed:.�cation tends

to produce. At the same time, they are intellectually on the side of

everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that

which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not

there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate

figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt,

who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the

douceur de Ia vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future,

the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into

being.

Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has described

what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where

there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it

meant to be excited by novel ideas which came drifting in from all

, ,

1 8 7

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

kinds o f sources, from classical texts an d the old Utopias o f the west,

from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books,

journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in

which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in

one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which

had long become forms of life in the civilised west.

This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast

simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and became a wistful,

gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages

of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and

occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some

other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in

France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or

that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or

nothing could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in

entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair,

becoming self-devouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly

poisoning both themselves and the life round them.

Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no

resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in

1 847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was

that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic

milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men,

to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.

Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good

fortune of those who enter peacefully upon some steady, fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic- young men who have been taught too much, are

too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing

too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and

go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way

and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing. This was a very characteristic

piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in

Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt

towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something

memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with

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ALEXAND E R H E RZEN

him all his life. Driven by it he became, as everyone knows who has

any acquaintance with the modern history of Russia, perhaps the

greatest of European publicists of his day, and founded the first freethat is i:o say, anti-tsarist- Russian press in Europe, thereby laying the foundation of revolutionary agitation in his country.

In his most celebrated periodical, which he called The Bell ( KDIDkol),

he dealt with anything that seemed to be of topical interest. He exposed,

he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian

Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a journalist of genius,

and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion, although,

of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by

radicals and conservatives alike. Indeed it was said that the Emperor

himself read them; certainly some among his officials did so; during

the heyday of his fame Herzen exercised a genuine influence within

Russia itself-an unheard of phenomenon for an tmtigre-by exposing

abuses, naming names, but, above all, by appealing to liberal sentiment

which had not completely died, even at the very heart of the tsarist

bureaucracy, at any rate during the I 8 50s and I 86os.

Unlike many who find themselves only on paper, or on a public

platform, Herzen was an entrancing talker. Probably the best descri�

tion of him is to be found in the essay from which I have taken my

title-'A Remarkable Decade', by his friend Annenkov. It was written

some twenty years after the events that it records.

I must own [ Annenkov wrote] that I was puzzled and overwhelmed,

when I first came to know Herzen-by this extraordinary mind

which daned from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness,

with inexhaustible wit and brilliance; which could see in the tum

of somebody's talk, in some simple incident, in some abstract idea,

that vivid feature which gives expression and life. He had a most

astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of

quite dissimilar things, and this gift he had in a very high degree,

fed as it was by the powers of the most subtle observation and a

very solid fund of encyclopedic knowledge. He had it to such a

. degree that, in the end, his listeners were sometimes exhausted by

the inextinguishable fireworks of his speech, the inexhaustible

fantasy and invention, a kind of prodigal opulence of intellect

which astonished his audience.

After the always ardent but remorselessly severe Belinsky, the

glancing, gleaming, perpetually changing and often paradoxical

and irritating, always wonderfully clever, talk of Herzen demanded

of those who were with him not only intense concentration, but

..

I 89

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

also perpetual alertness, because you had always to be prepared to

respond instantly. On the other hand, nothing cheap or tawdry

could stand even half an hour of contact with him. All pretentiousness, all pompousness, all pedantic self-importance, simply Red from him or melted like wax before a fire. I knew people, many of them

what are called serious and practical men, who could not bear

Herzen's presence. On the other hand, there were others . . . who

gave him the most blind and passionate adoration . . .

He had a natural gift for cr:ticism-a capacity for exposing and

denouncing the dark sides of life. And he showed this trait very

early, during the Moscow period of his life of which I am speaking.

Even then Herzen's mind was in the highest degree rebellious and

unmanageable, with a kind of innate, organic detestation of anything which seemed to him to be an accepted opinion sanctified by general silence about some unverified fact. In such cases the

predatory powers of his intellect would rise up in force and come

into the open, sharp, cunning, resourceful.

He lived in Moscow . . . still unknown to the public, but in his

own familiar circle he was already known as a witty and a dangerous

observer of his friends. Of course, he could not altogether conceal

the fact that he kept secret dossiers, secret protocols of his own,

about his dearest friends and distant acquaintances within the

privacy of his own thoughts. People who stood by his side, all

innocence and trustfulness, were invariably amazed, and sometimes extremely annoyed, when they suddenly came on one or other side of this involuntary activity of his mind. Strangely enough,

Herzen combined with this the tenderest, most loving relations with

his chosen intimates, although even they could never escape his

pungent analyses. This is explained by another side of his character.

As if to restore the equilibrium of his moral organism, nature took

care to place in his soul one unshakeable belief, one unconquerable

inclination. Herzen believed in the noble instincts of the human

heart. His analysis grew silent and reverent before the instinctive

impulses of the moral organism as the sole, indubitable truth of

existence. He admired anything which he thought to be a noble or

passionate impulse, however mistaken; and he never amused himself at its expense.

This ambivalent, contradictory play of his nature-suspicion and

denial on the one hand and blind faith on the other-often led to

perplexity and misunderstandings between him and his friends, and

sometimes to quarrels and scenes. But it is precisely in this crucible

of argument, in its Rames, that up to the very day of his departure

for Europe, people's devotion to him used to be tested and

strengthened instead of disintegrating. And this is perfectly intelli-

I QO

ALEXAND E R H E RZEN

gible. In all that Herzen did and all that Herzen thought at this

time there never was the slightest trace of anything false, no

malignant feeling nourished in darkness, no calculation, no treachery.

On the contrary, the whole of him was always there, in every one

of his words and deeds. And there was another reason which made

one sometimes forgive him even insults, a reason which may seem

unplausible to people who did not know him.

With all this proud, strong, energetic intellect, Herzen had a

wholly gentle, amiable, almost feminine character. Beneath the stem

outward aspect of the sceptic, the :>atirist, under the cover of a most

unceremonious, and exceedingly unreticent humour, there dwelt

the heart of a child. He had a curious, angular kind of charm, an

angular kind of delicacy . . . [but it was given] particularly to those

who were beginning, who were seeking after something, people who

were trying out their powers. They found a source of strength and

confidence in his advice. He took them into the most intimate communion with himself and with his ideas-which, nevertheless, did not stop him, at times, from using his full destructive, analytic

powers, from performing exceedingly painful, psychological experiments on these very same people at the very same time.

This vivid and sympathetic vignette tallies with the descriptions

left to us by Turgenev, Belinsky and others of Herzen's friends.

It is borne out, above all, by the impression which the reader

gains if he reads his own prose, his essays or the autobiographical

memoirs collected under the title My Post and Thoughts. The impression that it leaves is not conveyed even by Annenkov's devoted words.

The chief influence on Herzen as a young man in Moscow

University, as upon all the young Russian intellectuals of his time,

was of course that of Hegel. But although he was a fairly orthodox

Hegelian in his early years, he turned his Hegeliaqism into something

peculiar, personal to himself, very dissimilar from the theoretical conclusions which the more serious-minded and pedantic of his contemporaries deduced from that celebrated doctrine.

The chief effect upon him of Hegelianism seems to have been the

belief that no specific theory or single doctrine, no one interpretation

of life, above all, no simple, coherent, well-constructed sc-hemaneither the great French mechanistic models of the eighteenth century, nor the romantic German edifices of the nineteenth, nor the visions

of the great Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, nor the socialist

programmes of Cabet or Leroux or Louis Blanc-could conceivably

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R U S S IAN T H I N KE R S

be true solutions to real problems, at least not i n the form i n which

they were preached.

He was sceptical if only because he believed (whether or not he

derived this view from Hegel) that there could not in principle be

any simple or final answer to any genuine human problem; that if a

question was serious and indeed agonising, the answer could never be

dear-cut and neat. Above all, it could never consist in some symmetrical set of conclusions, drawn by deductive means from a collection of self-evident axioms.

This disbelief begins in Herzen's early, forgotten essays which he

wrote at the beginning of the I 84os, on what he called dilettantism

and Buddhism in science; where he distinguishes two kinds of intellectual personality, against both of which he inveighs. One is that of the casual amateur who never sees the trees for the wood; who is terrified,

Herzen tells us, of losing his own precious individuality in too much

pedantic preoccupation with actual, detailed facts, and therefore

always skims over the surface without developing a capacity for real

knowledge; who looks at the facts, as it were, through a kind of

telescope, with the result that nothing ever gets articulated save

enormous, sonorous generalisations floating at random like so many

balloons.

The other kind of student-the Buddhist-is the person who escapes

from the wood by frantic absorption in the trees; who becomes an

intense student of some tiny set of isolated facts, which he views

through more and more powerful microscopes. Although such a man

might be deeply learned in some particular branch of knowledge,

almost invariably-and particularly if he is a German (and almost all

Herzen's gibes and insults are directed against the hated Germans,

and that despite the fact that he was half German himself)-he becomes

intolerably tedious, pompous and blindly philistine; above all, always

repellent as a human being.

Between these poles it is necessary to find some compromise, and

Herzen believed that if one studied life in a sober, detached, and

objective manner, one might perhaps be able to create some kind of

tension, a sort of dialer.tical compromise, between these opposite ideals;

for if neither or' them can be realised fully and equally, neither of them

should be altogether deserted ; only thus could human beings be made

capable of understanding life in some profounder fashion than if they

committed themselves recklessly to one or the other of the two

extremes.

ALEXAND E R H E RZEN

This ideal of detachment, moderation, compromise, dispassionate

objectivity which Herren at this early period of his life was preaching,

was something deeply incompatible with his temperament. And indeed,

not long after, he bursts forth with a great paean to partiality. He

declares that he knows that this will not be well received. There

are certain concepts which simply are not received in good societyrather like people who have disgraced themselves in some appalling way. Partiality is not something which is well thought of in comparison,

for example, with abstract justice. Nevertheless, nobody has ever said

anything worth saying unless he was deeply and passionately partial.

There follows a long and typically Russian diatribe against the

chilliness, meanness, impossibility and undesirability of remaining

objective, of being detached, of not committing oneself, of not

plunging into the stream of life. The passionate voice of his friend

Belinsky is suddenly audible in Herzen's writings in this phase of his

development.

The fundamental thesis which emerges at this time, and is then

developed throughout his later life with marvellous poetry and

imagination, is the terrible power over human lives of ideological

abstractions (I say poetry advisedly; for as Dostoevsky in later years

very truly said, whatever else might be said about Herzen, he was

certainly a Russian poet; which saved him in the eyes of this jaundiced

but, at times, uncannily penetrating critic: Herzen's views or mode of

life naturally found little favour in his eyes).

Herzen declares that any attempt to explain human conduct in

terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstraction,

be it never so noble-justice, progress, nationality-even if preached by

impeccable altruists like Mazzini or Louis Blanc or Mill, always leads

in the end to victimisation and human sacrifice. Men are not simple

enough, human lives and relationships are too complex for standard

formulas and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit

them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal,

be the motives for doing it never so lofty, always lead in the end to a

terrible maiming of human beings, to political vivisection on an ever

increasing scale. The process culminates in the liberation of some

only at the price of enslavement of others, and the replacing of an old

tyranny with a new and sometimes far more hideous one-by the

imposition of the slavery of universal socialism, for example, as a

remedy for the slavery of the universal Roman Church.

There is a typical piece of dialogue between Herzen and Louis

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R U S SIAN T H INKERS

Blanc, the French socialist (whom . he respected greatly), which

Herzen quotes, and which shows the kind of levity with which

Herzen sometimes expressed his deepest convictions. The conversation

is described as having taken place in London somewhere in the early

sos. One day Louis Blanc observed to Herzen that human life was

a great social duty, 'that man must always sacrifice himself to society.

'Why?' I asked suddenly.

'How do you mean "Why?" [said Louis Blanc] -but surely the

whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'

'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and

nobody enjoys himself.'

'You are playing with words.'

'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied, laughing.

In this gay and apparently casual passage, Herzen embodies his

central principle-that the goal of life is life itself, that to sacrifice the

present to some vague and unpredictable future is a form of delusion

which leads to the destruction of all that alone is valuable in men and

societies-to the gratuitous sacrifice of the flesh and blood of live

human beings upon the altar of idealised abstractions.

Herzen is revolted by the central substance of what was being

preached by some of the best and purest-hearted men of his time,

particularly by socialists and utilitarians, namely, that vast suffering

in the present must be undergone for the sake of an ineffable felicity

in the future, that thousands of innocent men may be forced to die

that millions might be happy-battle cries that were common even in

those days, and of which a great deal more has been heard since. The

notion that there is a splendid future in store for humanity, that it is

guaranteed by history, and that it justifies the most appalling cruelties

in the present-this familiar piece of political eschatology, based on

belief in inevitable progress, seemed to him a fatal doctrine directed

against human life.

The profoundest and most sustained -and the most brilliantly

written-of all Herzen's statements on this topic is to be found in

the volume of essays which he called From tht Othtr Short, and wrote

as a memorial to his disillusionment with the European revolutions of

1 848 and 1 849. This great polemical masterpiece is Herzen's profession of faith and his political testament. Its tone and content are well conveyed in the characteristic (and celebrated) passage in which

he declares that one generation must not be condemned to the role of

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being a mere means to the welfare of its remote descendants, which

is in any case none too certain. A distant goal is a cheat and a deception.

Real goals must be closer than that- 'at the very least the labourer's

wage or pleasure in work performed'. The end of each generation is

itself-each life has its own unique experience; the fulfilment of its

wants creates new needs, claims, new forms of life. Nature, he

declares (perhaps under the influence of Schiller), is careless of human

beings and their needs, and crushes them heedlessly. Has history a

plan, a libretto? If it did 'it would lose all interest, become . . . boring,

ludicrous'. There are no timetables, no cosmic patterns; there is only

the ' Row of life', passion, will, improvisation; sometimes roads exist,

sometimes not; where there is no road 'genius will blast a path'.

But what if someone were to ask, 'Supposing all this is suddenly

brought to an end? Supposing a comet strikes us and brings to an end

life on earth? Will history not be meaningless? Will all this talk suddenly

end in nothing? Will it not be a cruel mockery of all our efforts, all

our blood and sweat and tears, if it all ends in some sudden, unexplained

brute fashion with some mysterious, totally unexplained event?' Herzen

replies that to think in these terms is a great vulgarity, the vulgarity

of mere numbers. The death of a single human being is no less absurd

and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race; it is a

mystery we accept; merely to multiply it enormously and ask 'Supposing millions of human beings die?' does not make it more mysterious or more frightening.

In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities

and forces, and in suitable conditions . . . they develop, and will

develop furiously. They may fill a world, or they may fall by the

roadside. They may take a new direction. They may stop. They

may collapse . . . Nature is perfectly indifferent to what happens . . .

[But then, you may ask,] what is all this for? The life of people

becomes a pointless game . . . Men build something with pebbles

and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures

crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces

and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after

centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again. Not in vain did

Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot . . .

. . . [To this I reply that] you are like . . . those very sensitive people

who shed a tear whenever they recollect that 'man is born but to

die'. To look at the end and not at the action itself is a cardinal

error. Of what use to the Rower is its bright magnificent bloom?

Or this intoxicating scent, since it will only pass away? . . . None

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at all. But nature i s not so miserly. She does not disdain what is

transient, what is only in the present. At every point she achieves all

she can achieve . . . Who will find fault with nature because flowers

bloom in the morning and die at night, because she has not

given the rose or the lily the hardness of flint? And this miserable

pedestrian principle wt wish to transfer to the world of history . . .

Life has no obligation to realise the fantasies and ideas [of civilisation] . . . Life loves novelty . . .

• . . History seldom repeats itself, it uses every accident, simultaneously knocks at a thousand doors . . . doors which may open . . . who knows?

And again :

Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they

like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in

love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever as in the very first

moment of his avowal . . . but life . . . gives no guarantees. Life

does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for

their continuance . . . Every historical moment is full and is

beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its

own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its

own storms and fair weather. Every period is new, fresh, filled

with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and

sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not

content with this, they must needs own the future too . . .

What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? . . . If you look

beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal,

the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will

only have memories and vain regrets . . . because, instead of listening, you were waiting for something else . . . You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life. What is this

goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the

socialists] are seeking-is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Is it something inevitable?

or not? If it is, are we simply puppets? . . . Are we morally free or

are we wheels within a machine?; I would rather think of life, and

therefore of history, as a goal attained, not as a means to something

else.

And:

We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does

grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child.

If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life

is death.

ALEXAN D E R H E RZEN

This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters

henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote

to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often

accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of

life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes

reward the pilgrim for all his sufFering�. Goethe has told us that there

can be no guarantee, no security. Man could be content with the

present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today,

because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all

those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for

supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human

civilisation, or socialism, or justice, or humanity-if not in the present,

then in the future.

Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty

is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush

their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some

vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which

we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous

metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there

is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee-to do that

is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the

second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values

we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of

abstractions-freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,

mystical sounds, idolised sets of :ovords.

Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is

what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to

perform an act of human sacrifice.

This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the

corollary that one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up

in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely

against the western socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let

alone the enemy-priests or conservatives) but even more against his

own close friend Bakunin, who persisted in trying to stir up violent

rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim,

confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins

that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral

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responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable

future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen,

perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous

if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem

so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and

intangible Utopia.

For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian

regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers

threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed

this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky,

he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible; that some great

system-a world adumbrated by Saint-Simon or by Proudhon-did

provide it: that if one regulated social life rationally and put it. in

order, and created a clear. and tidy organisation, human problems

could be finally resolved. Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his

socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of

'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because

Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although

never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came

toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of

1 848 and 1 849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have

feet of clay, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation: we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants.

But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence,

and suspicious of talent: 'they want a . . . government to rule for their

benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter

their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown; one must not be

filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . .' He speaks with bitter

scorn about monolithic, oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.

Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or

the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre, or the red

Aag? . . .

. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempestdreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .

[Our] institutions . ; . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be

liquidattd . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation]. But the masses

will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears,

want, ignorance and humiliation.

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He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too.

He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of

the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a

cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on

humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately

bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men

like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some

area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to

respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards

self-expression on the part of other- human beings too. He calls this

Petrograndism-the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter

the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the

feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia.

He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something

instead of nothing. Yet he is dearly aware, and became more and

more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in

his open letters To an Old Comrade- Bakunin-written in the late

1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour

of the Committee of Public Safety in 1 792 -the use of methods which

presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions-always in

the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that

whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts

inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion

who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what

human beings are really made of-the complex, crooked texture of

men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace

of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society,

because to suppress the bourgeoisie by violent revolution-and there

was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean,

grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all-before

its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the

bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social

order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison], to give

them a new function, as if a plan for a jail could be used for a free

existence.' Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison

architecture. And who shall say that history has proved that Herzen

was mistaken?

His loathing of the bourgeoisie is frantic, yet he does not want a

violent cataclysm. He thinks that it may be inevitable, that it may come,

but he is frightened of it. The bourgeoisie seems to him li-ke a collection

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o f Figaros, but o f Figaros grown fat and prosperous. H e declares that,

in the eighteenth century, Figaro wore a livery, a mark of servitude

to be sure, but still something different from, detachable from, his

skin; the skin, at least, was that of a palpitating, rebellious human

being. But today Figaro has won. Figaro has become a millionaire.

He is judge, commander-in-chief, president of the republic. Figaro

now dominates the world, and, alas, the livery is no longer a mere

livery. It has become part of his skin. It cannot be taken off; it has

become part of his living flesh.

Everything that was repellent and degrading in the eighteenth

century, against which the noble revolutionaries had protested, has

grown into the intrinsic texture of the mean middle-class beings who

now dominate us. And yet we must wait. Simply to cut off the;r

heads, as Bakunin wanted, can only lead to a new tyranny and a new

slavery, to the rule of the revolted minorities over majorities, or worse

still, the rule of majorities-monolithic majorities-over minorities, the

rule of what John Stuart Mill, in Herzen's view with justice, called

conglomerated mediocrity.

Herzen's values are undisguised : he likes only the style of free

beings, only what is large, generous, uncalculating. He admires pride,

independence, resistance to tyrants; he admires Pushkin because he

was defiant; he admires Lermontov because he dared to suffer and to

hate; he even approves of the Slavophils, his reactionary opponents,

because at least they detested authority, at least they would not let

the Germans in. He admires Belinsky because he was incorruptible,

and told the truth in the face of the arrayed battalions of German

academic or political authority. The dogmas of socialism seem to him

no less stifling than those of capitalism or of the Middle Ages or of

the early Christians.

What he hated most of all was the despotism of formulas- the submission of human beings to arrangements arrived at by deduction from some kind of a priori principles which had no foundation in

actual experience. That is why he feared the new liberators so deeply.

'If only people wanted,' he says, ' . . . instead of liberating humanity, to

liberate themselves, they would do much for . . . the liberation

of man .' He knew that his own perpetual plea for more individual

freedom contained the seeds of social atomisation, that a compromise

had to be found between the two great social needs-for organisation

and for individual freedom-some unstable equilibrium that would

preserve a minimal area within which the individual could express

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himself and not be utterly pulverised, and he utters a great appeal

for what he calls the value of egoism. He declares that one of the

great dangers to our society is that individuals will be tamed and

suppressed disinterestedly by idealists in the name of altruism, in the

name of measures designed to make the majority happy. The new

liberators may well resemble the inquisitors of the past, who drove

herds of innocent Spaniards, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen,

Italians to the autos-da-fl, and 'then went home peacefully with a

quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with

the smell of roasting human Besh still in their nostrils', and slept-the

sleep of the innocent after a day's work well done. Egoism is not to

be condemned without qualification. Egoism is not a vice. Egoism

gleams in the eye of an animal. Moralists bravely .thunder against it,

instead of building on it. What moralists try and deny is the great,

inner citadel of human dignity. 'They want . . /to make men tearful,

sentimental, insipid, kindly creatures, asking to be made slaves • . .

But to tear egoism from a man's heart is to rob him of his living

principles, of the yeast and salt of his personality.' Fortunately this is

impossible. Of course it is sometimes suicidal to try to assert oneself.

One cannot try and go up a staircase down which an army is trying

to march. That is done by tyrants, conservatives, fools and criminals.

'Destroy a man's altruism, and you get a savage orang-utan, but

if you destroy his egoism you generate a tame monkey.'

Human problems are too complex to demand simple solutions. Even

the peasant commune in Russia, in which Herun believed so deeply

as a 'lightning conductor', because he believed that peasants in Russia

at least had not been infected by the distorting, urban vices of the

European proletariat and the European bourgeoisie-even the peasant

commune did not, after all, as he points out, preserve Russia from

slavery. Liberty is not to the taste of the majority-only of the educated.

There are no guaranteed methods, no sure paths to social welfare.

We must try and do our best; and it is always possible that we shall fail.

The heart of his thought is the notion that the basic problems are

perhaps not soluble at all, that all one can do is to try to solve them,

but that there is no guarantee, either in socialist nostrums or in any

other human construction, no guarantee that happiness or a rational

life can be attained, in private or in public life. This curious combination of idealism and scepticism-not unlike, for all his vehemence, the oudook of Erasmus, Montaigne, Montesquieu-runs through all

his writings.

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Her-zen wrote novels, but they are largely forgotten, because he was

not a born novelist. His stories are greatly inferior to those of his

friend, Turgenev, but they have something in common with them.

For in Turgenev's novels, too, you will find that human problems

are not treated as if they were soluble. Bazarov in Fathn-s and Childrm

sufFers and dies; Lavretsky in A House of Gmtlifoll is left in melancholy uncertainty at the end of the novel, not because something had not been done which could have been done, not because there is a

solution round the corner which someone simply had not thought of,

or had refused to apply, but because, as Kant once said, ' From the

crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.' Everything is partly the fault of circumstance, partly the fault of the individual character, partly in the nature of life itself. This must be faced, it

must be stated, and it is a vulgarity and, at times, a crime to believe

that permanent solutions are always possible.

Her-zen wrote a novel called Who is to IJ/amt ? about a typical

tragic triangle in which one of the 'superfluous men' of whom I spoke

earlier falls in love with a lady in a provincial town who is married

to a virtuous, idealistic� but dull and naive husband. It is not a good

novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and

what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses,

in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife

falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds

like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred caricature of the Russian

novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and

at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of George Eliot are inapplicable because

they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical

doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.

At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the

notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and,

therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political

or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and

Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed

heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who

looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of

view; oscillating between one vantage point and another, between

the claims of society and of the individual, the claims of love and of

daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality

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of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient

political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression;

remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic

melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal;

religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism,

or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate

position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and

because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he

was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind,

rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect, with well-constructed

beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he

did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life

with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between

him and his material, within which alone his particular kind of

poetical creation is possible.

Herzen, on the contrary, cared far too violently. He was looking

for solutions for himself, for his own personal life. His novels were

certainly failures. He obtrudes himself too vehemently into them,

himself and his agonised point of view. On the other hand, his autobiographical sketches, when he writes openly about himself and about his friends, when he speaks about his own life in Italy, in France, in

Switzerland, in England, have a kind of palpitating directness, a sense

of first-handness and reality, which no other writer in the nineteenth

century begins to convey. His reminiscences are a work of critical

and descriptive genius with the power of absolute self-revelation that

only an astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting

personality, with an exceptional sense both of the noble and the

ludicrous, and a rare freedom from vanity and doctrine, could have

attained. As a writer of memoirs he is unequalled. His sketches of

England, or rather of himself in England, are better than Heine's or

Taine's. To demonstrate this one need only read his wonderful

account of English political trials, of how judges, for example, looked

to him when they sat in court trying foreign conspirators for having

fought a fatal duel in Windsor Park. He gives a vivid and entertaining

description of bombastic French demagogues and gloomy French

fanatics, and of the impassable gulf which divides this agitated and

..

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slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, an d dignified

institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the

presiding judge at the Old Bailey, who looks like the wolf in Red

Riding Hood, i n his white wig, his long skirts, with his sharp little

wolf-like face, thin lips, sharp teeth, and harsh little words that come

with an air of specious benevolence from the face encased in disarming

feminine curls-giving the impression of a sweet, grandmotherly, old

lady, belied by the small gleaming eyes and the dry, acrid, malicious

judicial humour.

He paints classical portraits of German exiles, whom he detested,

of Italian and Polish revolutionaries, whom he admired, and gives

little sketches of the differences between the nations, such as the

English and the French, each of which regards itself as the greatest

nation on earth, and will not yield an inch, and does not begin to

understand the other's ideals-the French with their gregariousness,

their lucidity, their didacticism, their neat formal gardens, as against

the English with their solitudes and dark suppressed romanticism, and

the tangled undergrowth of their ancient, illogical, but profoundly

civilised and humane institutions. And there are the Germans, who

regard themselves, he declares, as an inferior fruit of the tree of which

the English are the superior products, and come to England, and

after three days 'say "yes" instead of "ja", and "well" where it is not required'. It is invariably for the Germans that both he and

Bakunin reserved their sharpest taunts, not so much from personal

dislike as because the Germans to them seemed to stand for all that

was middle-class, cramping, philistine and boorish, the sordid despotism

of grey and small-minded drill sergeants, aesthetically more disgusting

than the generous, magnificent tyrannies of great conquerors of

history.

Where they are stopped by their conscience, we are stopped by a

policeman. Our weakness is arithmetical, and so we yield; their

weakness is an algebraic weakness, it is part of the formula itself.

This was echoed by Bakunin a decade later:

When an Englishman or an American says 'I am an Englishman',

'I am an American', they are saying 'I am a free man'; when a

German says 'I am a German' he is saying ' . . . my Emperor is

stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German soldier who

is strangling me will strangle you all . . . '

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This kind of sweeping prejudice, these diatribes against entire nations

and classes, are characteristic of a good many Russian writers of this

period. They are often ill-founded, unjust and violently exaggerated,

but they are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against

an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral

vision which makes them lively reading even now.

.

His irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the

conviction that human beings are complex and fragile, and that there

is value in the very irregularity of their structure which is violated

by attempts to force it into patterns or straitjackets - this and the

irrepressible pleasure in exploding all cut and dried social and political

schemata which serious-minded and pedantic saviours of mankind,

both radical and conservative, were perpetually manufacturing,

inevitably made Herun unpopular among the earnest and the devout

of all camps. In this respect he resembled his sceptical friend Turgenev,

who could not, and had no wish to, resist the desire to tell the truth,

however 'unscientific' -to say something psychologically telling, even

though it might not fit in with some generally _accepted, enlightened

system of ideas. Neither accepted the view that because he was on

the side of progress or revolution he was under a sacred obligation

to suppress the truth, or to pretend to think that it was simpler than

it was, or that certain solutions would work although it seemed

patently improbable that they could, simply because to speak otherwise

might give aid and comfort to the enemy.

This detachment from party and doctrine, and the tendency to utter

independent and sometimes disconcerting judgements, brought violent

criticism on both Herzen and Turgenev, and made their position

difficult. When Turgenev wrote Fathtrl and Childrm, he was duly

attacked both from the right and from the left, because neither was

clear which side he was supporting. This indeterminate quality

particularly irritated the 'new' young men in Russia, who assailed

him bitterly for being too liberal, too civilised, too ironical, too

sceptical, for undermining noble idealism by the perpetual oscillation

of political feelings, by excessive self-examination, by not engaging

himself and declaring war upon the enemy, and perpetrating instead

what amounted to a succession of evasions and minor treacheries.

Their hostility was di rectcd at all the 'men of the 4os', and in particular

at Herun, who was rightly looked on as their most brilliant and most

formidable representative. His answer to the stern, brutal young

revolutionaries of the 1 86os is exceedingly characteristic. The new

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revolutionaries had attacked him for nostalgic love of an older style

of life, for being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort,

for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle

from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely

talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round

them were squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice; for not seeking

salvation in some serious, manual labour-in cutting down a tree, or

making a pair of boots, or doing something 'concrete' and real in

order to identify himself with the suffering masses, instead of endless

brave talk in the drawing-rooms of wealthy ladies with other welleducated, nobly-born, equally feckless young men -self-indulgence and escapism, deliberate blindness to the horrors and agonies of their

world.

Herzen understood his opponents, and declined to compromise. He

admits that he cannot help preferring cleanliness to dirt; decency,

elegance, beauty, comfort, to violence and austerity, good literature

to bad, poetry to prose. Despite his alleged cynicism and 'aestheticism',

he declines to admit that only scoundrels can achieve things, that in

order to achieve a revolution that will liberate mankind and create a

new and nobler form of life on earth one must be unkempt, dirty,

brutal and violent, and trample with hob-nailed boots on civilisation

and the rights of men. He does not believe this, and sees no reason

why he should believe it.

As for the new generation of revolutionaries, they are not sprung

from nothing: they are the fault of his generation, which begat them

by its idle talk in the I 8.+os. These are men who come to avenge the

world against the men of the 4os-'the syphilis of our revolutionary

passions'. The new generation will say to the old : ' "you are hypocrites,

we will be cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like

scoundrels; you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors;

we shall be rude to all ; you bow without feeling respect, we shall

push and jostle and make no apologies . . . " ' He says in effect:

Organised hooliganism can solve nothing. Unless civilisation-the

recognition of the difference of good and bad, noble and ignoble,

worthy and unworthy-is preserved, unless there are some people who

are both fastidious and fearless, and are free to say what they want to

say, and do not sacrifice their lives upon some large, nameless altar,

and sink themselves into a vast, impersonal, grey mass of barbarians

marching to destroy, what is the point of the revolution? It may come

whether we like it or not. But why should we welcome, still less work

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ALEXANDER H ERZEN

for, the victory of the barbarians who will sweep away the wicked

old world only to leave ruins and misery on which nothing but a

new despotism can be built? The 'vast bill of indictment which

Russian literature has been drafting against Russian life' does not

demand a new philistinism in place of the old. 'Sorrow, scepticism,

irony . . . the three strings of the Russian lyre' are closer to reality

than the crude and vulgar optimism of the new materialists.

Herzen's most constant goal is the preservation of individual liberty.

That is the purpose of the guerrilla war which, as he once wrote to

Mazzini, he had fought from his earliest youth. What made him

unique in the nineteenth century is the complexity of his vision, the

degree to which he understood the causes and nature of confticting

ideals simpler and more fundamental than his own. He understood

what made-and what in a measure justified-radicals and revolutionaries: and at the same time he grasped the frightening consequences of their doctrines. He was in full sympathy with, and had a profound

psychological understanding of, what it was that gave the Jacobins

their severe and noble grandeur, and endowed them with a moral

magnificence which raised them above the horizon of that older

world which he found so attractive and which they had ruthlessly

crushed. He understood only too well the misery, the oppression, the

suffocation, the appalling inhumanity, the bitter cries for justice on

the part of the crushed elements of the population under the ancim

rlgime, and at the same time he knew that the new world which had

risen to avenge these wrongs must, if it was given its head, create its

own excesses and drive millions of human beings to useless mutual

extermination. Herzen's sense of reality, in particular of the need for,

and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any

age. His sense of the critical moral and political issues of his time is a

good deal more specific and concrete than that of the majority of the

professional philosophers of the nineteenth century, who tended to try

to derive general principles from observation of their society, and to

recommend solutions which are deduced by rational methods from

premises formulated in terms of the tidy categories in which they

sought to arrange opinions, principles and forms of conduct. Herzen

was a publicist and an essayist whom his early Hegelian training had

not ruined : he had acquired no taste for academic classifications: he

had a unique insight into the 'inner feel' of social and political predicaments: and with it a remarkable power of analysis and exposition.

Consequently he understood and stated the case, both emotional and

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intellectual, for violent revolution, for saying that a pair of boots was

of more value than all the plays of Shakespeare (as the 'nihilistic'

critic Pisarev once said in a rhetorical moment), for denouncing

liberalism and parliamentarism, which offered the masses votes and

slogans when what they needed was food, shelter, clothing; and understood no less vividly and dearly the aesthetic and even moral value of civilisations which rest upon slavery, where a minority produces

divine masterpieces, and only a small number of persons have the

freedom and the self-confidence, the imagination and the gifts, to be

able to produce forms of life that endure, works which can be shored

up against the ruin of our time.

This curious ambivalence, the alternation of indignant championship of revolution and democracy against the smug denunciation of them by liberals and conservatives, with no less passionate attacks

upon revolutionaries in the name of free individuals; the defence of

the claims of life and art, human decency, equality and dignity, with

the advocacy of a society in which human beings shall not exploit or

trample on one another even in the name of justice or progress or

civilisation or democracy or other abstractions-this war on two, and

often more, fronts, wherever and whoever the enemies of freedom

might turn out to be-makes Herren the most realistic, sensitive,

penetrating and convincing witness to the social life and the social

issues of his own time. His greatest gift is that of untrammelled understanding: he understood the value of the so-called 'superfluous' Russian idealists of the +OS because they were exceptionally free, and morally

attractive, and formed the most imaginative, spontaneous, gifted,

civilised and interesting society which he had ever known. At the

same time he understood the protest against it of the exasperated,

deeply earnest, rrooltls young radicals, repelled by what seemed to

them gay and irresponsible chatter among a group of aristocratic

jl4nmrs, unaware of the mounting resentment of the sullen mass of

the oppressed peasants and lower officials that would one day sweep

them and their world away in a tidal wave of violent, blind, but justified hatred which it is the business of true revolutionaries to foment and direct. Herren understood this conflict, and his autobiography

conveys the tension between individuals and classes, personalities and

opinions both in Russia and in the west, with marvellous vividness

and precision.

My Past and Thoughts is dominated by no single clear purpose, it

is not committed to a thesis; its author was not enslaved by any formula

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ALEXANDER H E RZEN

or any political doctrine, and for this reason, it remains a profound

and living masterpiece, and Herzen's greatest title to immortality. He

possesses other clai;ns: his political and social views were arrestingly

original, if only because he was among the very few thinkers of his

time who in principle rejected all general solutions, and grasped, as

very few thinkers have ever done, the crucial distinction between

words that are about words, and words that are about persons or

things in the real world. Nevertheless it is as a writer that he survives.

His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary

and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of

Turgenev and Tolstoy. Like War and Peau, like Fathers and

Children, it is wonderfully readable, and, save in inferior translation,

not dated, not Victorian, still astonishingly contemporary in feeling.

One of the elements in political genius is a sensibility to characteristics and processes in society while they are still in embryo and invisible to the naked eye. Herzen possessed this capacity to a high

degree, but he viewed the approaching cataclysm neither with the

savage exultation of Marx or Bakunin nor with the pessimistic

detachment of Burckhardt or T ocqueville. Like Proudhon he believed

the destruction of individual freedom to be neither desirable nor

inevitable, but, unlike him, as being highly probable, unless it was

averted by deliberate human effort. The strong tradition of libertarian

humanism in Russian socialism, defeated only in October 1 9 1 7,

derives from his writings. His analysis of the forces at work in his

day, of the individuals in whom they were embodied, of the moral

presupposition of their creeds and words, and of his own principles,

remains to this day one of the most penetrating, moving, and morally

formidable indictments of the great evils which have grown to maturity

in our own time.

209

Russian Populism

R us s I A N populism is the name not of a single political party, nor of

a coherent body of doctrine, but of a widespread radical movement in

Russia in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was born during

the great social and intellectual ferment which followed the death of

Tsar Nicholas I and the defeat and humiliation of the Crimean war,

grew to fame and influence during the I 86os and I 87os, and reached

its culmination with the assassination of Tsar Alexander I I, after

which it swiftly declined. Its leaders were men of very dissimilar

origins, outlooks and capacities; it was not at any stage more than

loose congeries of small independent groups of conspirators or their

sympathisers, who sometimes united for common action, and at other

times operated in isolation. These groups tended to differ both about

ends and about means. Nevertheless they held certain fundamental

beliefs in common, and possessed sufficient moral and political solidarity

to entitle them to be called a single movement. Like their predecessors,

the Decembrist conspirators in the 20s, and the circles that gathered

round Alexander Herz.en and Belinsky in the 30s and 40s, they

looked on the government and the social structure of their country

as a moral and political monstrosity-obsolete, barbarous, stupid and

odious-and dedicated their lives to its total destruction. Their general

ideas were not original. They shared the democratic ideals of the

European radicals of their day, and in addition believed that the

struggle between social and economic classes was the determining

factor in politics; they held this theory not in its Marxist form (which

did not effectively reach Russia until the 1 87os) but in the form in

which it was taught by Proudhon and Herzen, and before them by

Saint-Simon, Fourier and other French socialists and radicals whose

writings had entered Russia, legally and illegally, in a thin but steady

stream for several decades.

The theory of social history as dominated by the class war-the

heart of which is the notion of the coercion of the 'have-nots' by the

'haves'-was born in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the

west; and its most characteristic concepts belong to the capitalist

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phase of economic development. Economic classes, capitalism, cutthroat competition, proletarians and their exploiters, the evil power of unproductive finance, the inevitability of increasing centralisation

and standardisation of all human activities, the transformation of men

into commodities and the consequent 'alienation' of individuals and

groups and degradation of human lives-these notions are fully

intelligible only in the context of expanding industrialism. Russia,

even as late as the I 8 50s, was one of the least industrialised states in

Europe. Nevertheless, exploitation and misery had long been amongst

the most familiar and universally recognised characteristics of its social

life, the principal victims of the system being the peasants, both serfs

and free, who formed over nine-tenths of its population. An industrial

proletariat had indeed come into being, but by mid-century did not

exceed two or three per cent of the population of the Empire. Hence

the cause of the oppressed was still at that date overwhelmingly that

of the agricultural workers, who formed the lowest stratum of the

population, the vast majority being serfs in state or private possession.

The populists looked upon them as martyrs whose grievances they

were determined to avenge and remedy, and as embodiments of

simple uncorrupted virtue, whose social organisation (which they

largely idealised) was the natural foundation on which the future of

Russian society must be rebuilt.

The central populist goals were social justice and social equality.

Most of them were convinced, following Herzen, whose revolutionary

propaganda in the I 8 50s influenced them more than any other single

set of ideas, that the essence of a just and equal society existed already

in the Russian peasant commune-the ohshchina organised in the form

of a collective unit called the mir. The mir was a free association of

peasants which periodically redistributed the agricultural land to be

tilled; its decisions bound all its members, and constituted the cornerstone on which, so the populists maintained, a federation of socialised, self-governing units, conceived along lines popularised by the French

socialist Proudhon, could be erected. The populist leaders believed

that this form of cooperation offered the possibility of a free and

democratic social system in Russia, originating as it did in the deepest

moral instincts and traditional values of Russian, and indeed all human,

society, and they believed that the workers (by which they meant all

productive human beings), whether in town or country, could bring

this system into being with a far smaller degree of violence or coercion

than had occurred in the industrial west. This system, since it alone

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sprang naturally from fundamental human needs and a sense of the

right and the good that existed in all men, would ensure justice,

equality, and the widest opportunity for the full development of

human faculties. As a corollary of this, the populists believed that the

development of large-scale centralised industry was not 'natural', and

therefore led inexorably to the degradation and dehumanisation of all

those who were caught in its tentacles: capitalism was an appalling

evil, destructi�e of body and soul; but it was not inescapable. They

denied that social or economic progress was necessarily bound up with

the Industrial Revolution. They maintained that the application of

scientific truths and methods to social and individual problems (in

which they passionately believed), although it might, and often did,

lead to the growth of capitalism, could be realised without this fatal

sacrifice. They believed that it was possible to improve life by scientific techniques without necessarily destroying the 'natural' life of the peasant village, or creating a vast, pauperised, faceless city proletariat.

Capitalism seemed irresistible only because it had not been sufficiently

resisted. However it might be in the west, in Russia 'the curse of

bigness' could still be successfully fought, and federations of small

self-governing units of producers, as Fourier and Proudhon had

advocated, could be fostered, and indeed created, by deliberate action.

Like their French masters, the Russian disciples held the institution

of the state in particular hatred, since to them it was at once the

symbol, the result and the main source of injustice and inequalitya weapon wielded by the governing class to defend its own privilegesand one that, in the face of increasing resistance from its victims, grew progressively more brutal and blindly destructive.

The defeat of liberal and radical movements in the west in I 848-9

confirmed them in their conviction that salvation did not lie in politics

or political parties: it seemed clear to them that liberal parties and their

leaders had neither understood nor made a serious effort to forward

the fundamental interests of the oppressed populations of their

countries. What the vast majority of peasants in Russia (or workers

in Europe) needed was to be fed and clothed, to be given physical

security, to be rescued from disease, ignorance, poverty, and humiliating inequalities. As for political rights, votes, parliaments, republican forms, these were meaningless and useless to ignorant, barbarous, halfnaked and starving men; such programmes merely mocked their misery. The populists shared with the nationalistic Russian Slavophils

(with whose political ideas they had otherwise little in common) a

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R U S S IAN POP U L I S M

loathing of the rigidly class-conscious social pyramid of the west that

was complacently accepted, or fervently believed in, by the conformist

bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy to whom this bourgeoisie looked up.

The satirist Saltykov, in his famous dialogue between a German

and a Russian boy, immortalised this attitude when he declared his

faith in the Russian boy, hungry and in rags, stumbling in the mud

and squalor of the accursed, slave-owning tsarist regime, because he

had not, like the neat, docile, smug, well-fed, well-dressed German

bOy, bartered away his soul for the few pence that the Prussian official

had offered him, and was consequently capable, if only he was allowed

to do so (as the Gennan boy no longer was), of rising one day to his

full human height. Russia was in darkness and in chains, but her

spirit was not captive; her past was black, but her future promised

more than the death in life of the civilised middle classes in Germany

or France or England, who had long ago sold themselves for material

security and had become so apathetic in their shameful, self-imposed

servitude that they no longer knew how to want to be free.

The populists, unlike the Slavophils, did not believe in the unique

character or destiny of the Russian people. They were not mystical

nationalists. They believed only that Russia was a backward nation

which had not reached the stage of social and economic development

at which the western nations (whether or not they could have avoided

this) had entered upon the path of unrestrained industrialism. They

were not, for the most part, historical determinists; consequently they

believed that it was possible for a nation in such a predicament to

avoid this fate by the exercise of intelligence and will. They saw no

reason why Russia could not benefit by western science and western

technology without paying the appalling price paid by the west. They

argued that it was possible to avoid the despotism of a centralised

economy or a centralised government by adopting a loose, federal

structure composed of self-governing, socialised units both of producers

and of consumers. They held that it was desirable to organise, but not

to lose sight of other values in the pursuit of organisation as an end

in itself; to be governed primarily by ethical and humanitarian and

not solely by economic and technological-'ant-hill'-considerations.

They declared that to protect human individuals against exploitation

by turning them into an industrial army of collectivised robots was

self-stultifying and suicidal. The ideas of the populists wer:e often

unclear, and there were sharp differences among them, but there was

an area of agreement wide enough to constitute a genuine movement.

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R U SSIAN TH INKERS

Thus they accepted, in broad outline, the educational and moral

lessons, but not the state worship, of Rousseau. Some of them-indeed

perhaps the majority-shared Rousseau's belief in the goodness of

simple men, his conviction that the cause of corruption is the crippling

effect of bad institutions, his acute distrust of all forms of cleverness,

of intellectuals and specialists, of all self-isolating coteries and factions.

They accepted the anti-political ideas, but not the technocratic

centralism, of Saint-Simon. They shared the belief in conspiracy and

violent action preached by Babeuf and his disciple Buonarotti, but not

their Jacobin authoritarianism. They stood with Sismondi and

Proudhon and Lamennais and the other originators of the notion of

the welfare state, against, on the one hand, laissn-fairt, and, on the

other, central authority, whether nationalist or socialist, whether

temporary or permanent, whether preached by List, or Mazzini, or

Lassalle, or Marx. They came close at times to the positions of

western Christian socialists, without, however, any religious faith,

since, like the French Encyclopedists of the previous century, they

believed in 'natural' morality and scientific truth. These were some

of the beliefs that held them together. But they were divided by

differences no less profound.

The first and greatest of their problems was their attitude towards

the peasants in whose name all that they did was done. Who was to

show the peasants the true path to justice and equality? Individual

liberty is not, indeed, condemned by the populists, but it tends to be

regarded as a liberal catchword, liable to distract attention from

immediate social and economic tasks. Should one train experts to

teach the ignorant younger brothers-the tillers of the soil, and, if

need be, stimulate them to resist authority, to revolt and destroy the

old order before the rebels had themselves fully grasped the need or

meaning of such acts? That is the view of such dissimilar figures as

Bakunin and Speshnev in the 1 84os; it was preached by Chernyshevsky in the 50s, and was passionately advocated by Zaichnevsky and the Jacobins of 'Young Russia' in the 6os; it was preached by

Lavrov in the 70s and 8os, and equally by his rivals and opponentsthe believers in disciplined professional terrorism-Nechaev and Tkachev, and their followers who include-for this purpose alonenot only the Socialist-Revolutionaries but also some of the most fanatical Russian Marxists, in particular Lenin and Trotsky.

Some among them asked whether this training of revolutionary

groups might not create an arrogant elite of seekers of power and

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R U S SIAN POP U L I S M

autocracy, men who would, at best, believe i t their duty to give the

peasants not what the peasants asked for but what they-their selfappointed mentors-thought good for them, namely, that which the masses ought to ask for, whether they in fact did so or not. They

· pushed the question farther, and asked whether this would not, in due

course, breed fanatical men who would pay too little heed to the

actual wants of the vast majority of the Russian population, intent on

forcing upon them only what they-the dedicated order of professional

revolutionaries, cut off from the life of the masses by their own special

training and conspiratorial lives-had chosen for them, ignoring the

hopes and protests of the people itself. Was there not a terrible danger

here of the substitution of a new yoke for the old, of a despotic

oligarchy of intellectuals in the place of the nobility and the bureaucracy and the tsar? What reason was there for thinking that the new masters would prove less oppressive than the old?

This was argued by some among the terrorists of the 6os- lshutin

and Karakozov, for example-and even more forcibly by the majority

of the idealistic young men, who 'went among the people' in the 70s

and later, with the aim not so much of teaching others as of themselves learning how to live, in a state of mind inspired by Rousseau (and perhaps by Nekrasov or Tolstoy) at least as much as by the more

tough-minded social theorists. These young men, the so-called

'repentant gentry', believed themselves to have been corrupted not

merely by an evil social system but by the very process of liberal

education which makes for deep inequalities and inevitably lifts

scientists, writers, professors, experts, civilised men in general, too

high above the heads of the masses, and so itself becomes the richest

breeding-ground of injustice and class oppression; everything that

obstructs understanding between individuals or groups or nations, that

creates and keeps in being obstacles to human solidarity and fraternity

is to ipso evil; specialisation and university education build walls

between men, prevent individuals and groups from 'connecting', kill

love and friendship, and are among the major causes responsible for

what, after Hegel and his followers, came to be called the 'alienation'

of entire orders or classes or cultures.

Some among the populists contrived to ignore or evade this r-roblem.

Bakunin, for example, who, if not a populist himself, influenced

populism profoundly, denounced faith in intellectuals and experts as

liable to lead to the most ignoble of tyrannies-the rule of scientists

and pedants-but would not face the problem of whether the revolu-

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

tionaries had come to teach o r to learn. I t was left uiWlswered by

the terrorists of the 'People's Will' and their sympathisers. More

sensitive and morally scrupulous thinkers- Chernyshevsky and

Kropotkin, for example-felt the oppressive weight of the question,

and did not attempt to conceal it from themselves; yet whenever they

asked themselves by what right they proposed to impose this or that

system of social organisation on the mass of peasants who had grown

up in a wholly different way of life, and one that might embody far

profounder values of its own, they gave no clear reply. The question

became even more acute when it was asked (as it increasingly came

to be in the 6os) what was to be done if the peasants actually resisted

the revolutionaries' plans for their liberation? Must the masses be

deceived, or, worse still, coerced? No one denied that in the end it

was the people and not the revolutionary elite that must govern, but

in the meanwhile how far was one allowed to go in ignoring the

majority's wishes, or in forcing them into courses which they plainly

loathed?

This was by no means a merely academic problem. The first

enthusiastic adherents of radical populism-the missionaries who went

'to the people' in the famous summer of I 874-were met by mounting

indifference, suspicion, resentment, and sometimes active hatred and

resistance, on the part of their would-be beneficiaries, who, as often

as not, handed them over to the police. The populists were thus

forced to define their attitude explicitly, since they believed passionately in the need to justify their activities by rational argument. Their answers, when they came, were far from unanimous. The activists,

men like Tkachev, Nechaev, and, in a less political sense, Pisarev,

whose admirers came to be known as 'nihilists', anticipated Lenin in

their contempt for democratic methods. Since the days of Plato it has

been argued that the spirit is superior to the flesh, and that those who

know must govern those who do not. The educated cannot listen to

the uneducated and ignorant masses. The masses must be rescued by

whatever means were available, if necessary against their own foolish

wishes, by guile or fraud, or violence if need be. But it was only a

minority in the movement who accepted this division and the authoritarianism that it entailed. The majority were horrified by the open advocacy of such Machiavellian tactics, and thought that no end,

however good, could fail to be destroyed by the adoption of monstrous

means.

A similar conflict broke out over the attitude to the state. All

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R U S S IAN POPU L I S M

Russian populists were agreed that the state was the embodiment of

a system of coercion and inequality, and therefore intrinsically evil;

neither justice nor happiness was possible until it was eliminated.

But in the meanwhile what was to be the immediate aim of the

revolution? Tkachev is quite clear that until the capitalist enemy had

been finally destroyed, the weapon of coercion-the pistol torn from

his hand by the revolutionaries-must on no account be thrown away,

but must itself be turned against him. In other words the machinery

of the state must not be destroyed, but must be used against the

inevitable counter-revolution; it cannot be dispensed with until the

last enemy has been-in Proudhon's immortal phrase-successfully

liquidated, and mankind consequently has no further need of any

instrument of coercion. In this doctrine he was followed by Lenin

more faithfully than mere adherence to the ambivalent Marxist

formula about the dictatorship of the proletariat seemed to require.

Lavrov, who represents the central stream of populism, and reRects

all its vacillations and confusions, characteristically advocated not

indeed the immediate or total elimination of the state but its systematic

reduction to something vaguely described as the minimum. Chernyshevsky, who is the least anarchistic of the populists, conceives of the state as the organiser and protector of the free associations of peasants

or workers, and contrives to see it at once as centralised and decentralised, a guarantee of order and efficiency, and of equality and individual liberty too.

All these thinkers share one vast apocalyptic assumption: that once

the reign of evil-autocracy, exploitation, inequality-is consumed in the

fire of the revolution, there will arise naturally and spontaneously out

of its ashes a natural, harmonious, just order, needing only the gentle

guidance of the enlightened revolutionaries to attain its proper perfection. This great Utopian dream, based on simple faith in regenerated human nature, was a vision which the populists shared with Godwin

and Bakunin, Marx and Lenin. Its heart is the pattern of sin and

death and resurrection-of the road to the earthly paradise, the gates

of which will only open if men find the one true way and follow it.

Its roots lie deep in the religious imagination of mankind; and there is

therefore nothing surprising in the fact that this secular version of it

had strong affinities with the faith of the Russian Old Believers-the

dissenting sects-for whom, since the great religious schism of the

seventeenth century, the Russian state and its rulers, particularly

Peter the Great, represented the rule of Satan upon earth; this

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RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

persecuted religious underground provided a good many potential

allies whom the populists made efforts to mobilise.

There were deep divisions among the populists; they differed about

the future role of the intellectuals, as compared with that of the

peasants; they differed about the historical importance of the rising

class of capitalists, gradualism versus conspiracy, education and propaganda versus terrorism and preparation for immediate risings. All these questions were interrelated and they demanded immediate solutions.

But the deepest rift among the populists arose over the urgent question

of whether a truly democratic revolution could �ibly occur before

a sufficient number of the oppressed had become fully conscious-that

is, capable of understanding and analysing the causes of their intolerable condition. The moderates argued that no revolution could justly be called democratic unless it sprang from the rule of the revolutionary

majority. But in that event, there was perhaps no alternative to

waiting until education and propaganda had created this majority-a

course that was being advocated by almost all western socialists

Marxist and non-Marxist alike-in the second half of the nineteenth

century.

Against this the Russian Jacobins argued that to wait, and in the

meanwhile to condemn all forms of revolt organised by resolute

minorities as irresponsible terrorism or, worse still, as the replacement

of one despotism by another, would lead to catastrophic results: while

the revolutionaries procrastinated, capitalism would develop rapidly;

the breathing space would enable the ruling class to develop a social

and economic base incomparably stronger than that which it possessed

at present; the growth of a prosperous and energetic capitalism would

create opportunities of employment for the radical intellectuals themselves: doctors, engineers, educators, economists, technicians, and experts of all types would be assigned profitable tasks and positions;

their new bourgeois masters (unlike the existing regime) would be

intelligent enough not to force them into any kind of political conformity; the intelligentsia would obtain special privileges, status, and wide opportunities for self-expression-harmless radicalism would be

tolerated, a good deal of personal liberty permitted-and in this way

the revolutionary cause would lose its more valuable recruits. Once

those whom insecurity and discontent had driven into making common

cause with the oppressed had been partially satisfied, the incentive to

revolutionary activity would be weakened, and the prospects of a

radical transformation of society would become exceedingly dim. The

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R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M

radical wing of the revolutionaries argued with great force that the

advance of capitalism, whatever Marx might say, was not inevitable;

it might be so in western Europe, but in Russia it could still be arrested

by a revolutionary coup, destroyed in the root before it had had time

to grow too strong. If recognition of the need to awaken the 'political

consciousness' of the majority of the workers and peasants (which by

this time, and partly as a result of the failure of the intellectuals in

I 848, had been pronounced absolutely indispensable to the revolution

both by Marxists and by the majority of the populist leaders) was

tantamount to the adoption of a gradualist programme, the moment

for action would surely be missed; and i n place of the populist or

socialist revolution would there not arise a vigorous, imaginative,

predatory, successful capitalist regime which would succeed Russian

semi-feudalism as surely as it had replaced the feudal order in western

Europe? And then who could tell how many decades or centuries

might elapse before the arrival, at long last, of the revolution? When

it did arrive, who could tell what kind of order it would, by that time,

install-resting upon what social basis?

All populists were agreed that the village commune was the ideal

embryo of those socialist groups on which the future society was to be

based. But would the development of capitalism not automatically

destroy the commune? And if it was maintained (although perhaps

this was not explicitly asserted before the I 88os) that capitalism was

already destroying the mir, that the class struggle, as analysed by Marx,

was dividing the villages as surely as the cities, then the plan of action

was clear: rather than sit with folded hands and watch this disintegration fatalistically, resolute men could and must arrest this process, and save the village commune. Socialism, so the Jacobins argued, could be

introduced by the capture of power to which all the energies of the

revolutionaries must be bent, even at the price of postponing the task

of educating the peasants in moral, social, and political realities; indeed,

such education could surely be promoted more rapidly and efficiently

after the revolution had broken the resistance of the old regime.

This line of thought, which bears an extraordinary resemblance, if

not to tl1e actual words, then to the policies pursued by Lenin in

191 7, was basically very different from the older Marxist determinism.

Its perpetual refrain was that there was no time to lose. Kulaks were

devouring the poorer peasants in the country, capitalists were breeding

fast in the towns. If the government possessed even a spark of intelligence, it would make concessions and promote reforms, and by this

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m eans divert educated men whose will and brain were needed for the

revolution into the peaceful paths of the service of the reactionary

state; propped up by such liberal measures, the unjust order would

continue and be strengthened. The activists argued that there was

nothing inevitable about revolutions: they were the fruit of human

will and human reason. If there were not enough of these, the

revolution might never take place at all. It was only the insecure

who craved social solidarity and communal life; individualism was

always a luxury, the ideal of the socially established. The new class

of technical specialists-the modern, enlightened, energetic men celebrated by liberals like Kavelin and Turgenev, and at times even by the radical individualist Pisarev-were for the Jacobin Tkachev 'worse

than cholera or typhus', for by applying scientific methods to social

life they were playing into the hands of the new, rising capitalist

oligarchs and thereby obstructing the path to freedom. Palliatives were

fatal when only an operation could save the patient : they merely prolonged his disease and weakened him so much that in the end not even an operation could save him. One must strike before these new, potentially conformist, intellectuals had grown too numerous and too comfortable and had obtained too much power, for otherwise it would

be too late: a Saint-Simonian elite of highly-paid managers would

preside over a new feudal order-an economically efficient but socially

immoral society, inasmuch as it was based on permanent inequality. ·

The greatest of all evils was inequality. Whenever any other ideal

came into conflict with equality, the Russian Jacobins always called

for its sacrifice or modification; the first principle upon which all

justice rested was that of equality; no society was equitable in which

there was not a maximum degree of equality between men. If the

revolution was to succeed, three major fallacies had to be fought and

rooted out. The first was that men of culture alone created progress.

This was not true, and had the bad consequence of inducing faith in

�lites. The second was the opposite illusion-that everything must be

learnt from the common people. This was equally false. Rousseau's

Arcadian peasants were so many idyllic figments. The masses were

ignorant, brutal, reactionary, and did not understand their own needs

or good. If the revolution depended upon their maturity, or capacity

for political judgment or organisation, it would certainly fail. The last

fallacy was that only a proletarian majority could successfully make a

revolution. No doubt a proletarian majority might do that, but if

Russia was to wait until it possessed one, the opportunity of destroying

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a corrupt and detested government would pass, and capitalism would

be found to be too firmly in the saddle.

What, then, must be done? Men must be trained to make the

revolution and destroy the present system and all obstacles to social

equality and democratic self-government. When this was achieved, a

democratic assembly was to be convened, and if those who made the

revolution took care to explain the reasons for it, and the social and

economic situation that made it necessary, then the masses, benighted

though they might be today, would assuredly, in the view of the

Jacobins, grasp their condition sufficiently to allow themselves to beindeed to welcome the opportunity of being-organised into the new free federation of productive associations.

But supposing they were still, on the morrow of a successful coup

d'etat, not mature enough to see this? Herzen did indeed ask this

awkward question again and again in his writings in the late 1 86os.

The majority of the populists were deeply troubled by it. But the

activist wing had · no doubt of the answer: strike the chains from the

captive hero, and he will stretch himself to his full height and live in

freedom and happiness for ever after. The views of these men were

astonishingly simple. They believed in terrorism and more terrorism

to achieve complete, anarchist liberty. The purpose of the revolution,

for them, was to establish absolute equality, not only economic and

social, but 'physical and physiological': they saw no discrepancy

between this bed of Procrustes and absolute freedom. This order

would be imposed in the beginning by the power and authority of

the state, after which, the state, having fulfilled its purpose, would

swiftly 'liquidate' itself.

Against this, the spokesmen of the main body of the populists

argued that J acobin means tended to bring about J acobin consequences:

if the purpose of the revolution was to liberate, it must not use the

weapons of despotism that were bound to enslave those whom they

were designed to liberate: the remedy must not prove more destructive

than the disease. To use the state to break the power of the exploiters

and to impose a specific form of life upon a people, the majority of

whom had not been educated to understand the need for it, was to

exchange the tsarist yoke for a flew, not necessarily less crushing

one-that of the revolutionary minority. The majority of the populists

were deeply democratic; they believed that all power tended to corrupt,

that all concentration of authority tended to perpetuate itself, that all

centralisation was coercive and evil, and, therefore, the sole hope of a

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

just and free society lay in the peaceful conversion o f men by rational

argument to the truths of social and economic justice and democratic

freedom. In order to obtain the opportunity of converting men to this

vision, it might indeed be necessary to break the existing obstacles to

free and rational intercourse-the police state, the power of capitalists

or of landowners-and to use force in the process, whether mass

mutiny or individual terrorism. But this concept of temporary

measures presented itself to them as something wholly different from

leaving .absolute power in the hands of any party or group, however

virtuous, once the power of the enemy had been broken. Their case

is the classical case, during the last two centuries, of every libertarian

and federalist against Jacobins and centralisers; it is Voltaire's case

against both Helvetius and Rousseau; that of the left wing of the

Gironde against the Mountain; Herzen used these arguments against

doctrinaire communists of the immediately preceding period-Cabet

and the disciples of Babeuf; Bakunin denounced the Marxist demand

for the dictatorship of the proletariat as something that would merely

transfer power from one set of oppressors to another; the populists of

the 8os and 90s urged this against all those whom they suspected of

conspiring (whether they realised it or not) to destroy individual

spontaneity and freedom, whether they were laisuz-faire liberals who

allowed factory owners to enslave the masses, or radical collectivists

who were ready to do so themselves; whether they were capitalist

entrepreneurs (as Mikhailovsky wrote to Dostoevsky in his celebrated

criticism of his novel The Posse sud) or Marxist advocates of centralised

authority; he looked upon both as far more dangerous than the

pathological fanatics pilloried by Dostoevsky-as brutal, amoral social

Darwinists, profoundly hostile to variety and individual freedom and

character.

This, again, was the main political issue which, at the turn of the

century, divided the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries from the Social

Democrats; and over which, a few years later, both Plekhanov and

Martov broke with Lenin: indeed the great quarrel between the

Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (whatever its ostensible cause) turned

upon it. In due course Lenin himself, two or three years after the

October Revolution, while he never abandoned the central Marxist

doctrine, expressed his bitter disappointment with those very consequences of it which his opponents had predicted-bureaucracy and the arbitrary despotism of the party officials; and Trotsky accused Stalin

of this same crime. The dilemma of means and ends is the deepest

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R U S SIAN P O P U L I S M

and most agonising problem that torments the revolutionary movements of our own day in all the continents of the world, not least in Asia and Africa. That this debate took so clear and articulate a form

within the populist movement makes its development exceptionaJly

relevant to our own predicament.

All these differences occurred within the framework of a common

revolutionary outlook, for, whatever their disagreements, all populists

were united by an unshakeable faith in the revolution. This faith

derived from many sources. It sprang from the needs and outlook of a

society still overwhelmingly pre-industrial, which gave the craving for

simplicity and fraternity, and the agrarian idealism which derives

ultimately from Rousseau, a reality which can still be seen in India

and Africa today, and which necessarily looks Utopian to the eyes of

social historians born in the industrialised west. It was a consequence

of the disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, liberal convictions, and the good faith of bourgeois intellectuals that resulted from the fiasco of the European revolutions of 1 848-9, and from the

particular conclusion drawn by Herzen that Russia, which had not

suffered this revolution, might find her salvation in the undestroyed

natural socialism of the peasant mir. It was deeply influenced by

Bakunin's violent diatribes against all forms of central authority, and

in particular the state; and by his vision of men as being by nature

peaceful and productive, and rendered violent only when they are

perverted from their proper ends, and forced to be either gaolers or

convicts. But it was also fed by the streams that flowed in a contrary

direction: by Tkachev's faith in a Jacobin �lite of professional revolutionaries as the only force capable of destroying the advance of capitalism, helped on its fatal path by innocent reformists and humanitarians and careerist intellectuals, and concealed behind the repulsive sham of parliamentary democracy; even more by the passionate

utilitarianism of Pisarev, and his brilliant polemics against all forms

of idealism and amateurishness, and, in particular, the sentimental

idealisation of the simplicity and beauty of peasants in general, and of

Russian peasants in particular, as beings touched by grace, remote from

the corrupting influences of the decaying west. It was supported by the

appeal which these 'critical realists' made to their compatriots to save

themselves by self-help and hard-headed energy-a kind of nee

Encyclopedist campaign in favour of natural science, skill, and

professionalism, directed against the humanities, classical learning,

history, and other forms of 'sybaritic' self-indulgence. Above all, it

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R U S SIAN TH I N KE RS

contrasted 'realism' with the literary culture which had lulled the best

men in Russia into a condition where corrupt bureaucrats, stupid and

brutal landowners, and an obscurantist Church could exploit them or

let them rot, while aesthetes and liberals looked the other way.

But the deepest strain of all, the very centre of the populist outlook,

was the individualism and rationalism of Lavrov and Mikhailovsky.

With Herzen they believed that history followed no predetermined

pattern, that it possessed 'no libretto', that neither the violent conflicts

between cultures, nations, classes (which for Hegelians constituted

the essence of human progress), nor the struggles for power by one

class over another (represented by Marxists as being the motive force

of history) were inevitable. Faith in human freedom was the cornerstone of populist humanism: the populists never tired of repeating that ends were chosen by men, not imposed upon them, and that men's

wills alone could construct a happy and honourable life-a life in

which the interests of intellectuals, peasants, manual workers and the

liberal professions could be reconciled; not indeed made wholly to

coincide, for that was an unattainable ideal; but adjusted in an unstable

equilibrium, which human reason and constant human care could

adjust to the largely unpredictable consequences of the interaction of

men with each other and with nature. It may be tltat the tradition

of the Orthodox Church with its conciliar and communal principles

and deep antagonism both to the authoritarian hierarchy of the Roman

Church, and the individualism of the Protestants, also exercised its

share of influence. These doctrines and these prophets and their

western masters- French radicals before and after the French revolution, as well as Fichte and Buonarotti, Fourier and Hegel, Mill and Proudhon, Owen and Marx-played their part. But the largest figure

in the populist movement, the man whose temperament, ideas and

activities dominated it from beginning to end, is undoubtedly Nikolay

Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The influence of his life and teachings,

despite a multitude of monographs, still awaits its interpreter.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky was not a man of original ideas. He did

not possess the depth, the imagination, or the brilliant intellect and

literary talent of Herzen; nor the eloquence, the boldness, the temperament or the reasoning power of Bakunin, nor the moral genius and unique social insight of Belinsky. But he was a man of unswerving

integrity, immense industry, and a capacity rare among Russians for

concentration upon concrete detail. His deep, steady, lifelong hatred

of slavery, injustice and irrationality did not express itself in large

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theoretical generalisations, or the creation of a sociological or metaphysical system, or violent action against authority. It took the form of slow, uninspired, patient accumulation of facts and ideas-a crude,

dull, but powerful intellectual structure on which one might found a

detailed policy of practical action appropriate to the specific Russian

environment which he desired to alter. Chernyshevsky was in greater

sympathy with the concrete, carefully elaborated socialist plans, however mistaken they might be, of the Petrashevsky group (to which Dostoevsky had belonged in his youth), crushed by the government in

I 849, than with the great imaginative constructions of Herzen,

Bakunin and their followers.

A new generation had grown up during the dead years after 1 849.

These young men had witnessed vacillation and outright betrayals on

the part of liberals, which had led to the victories of the reactionary

parties in 1 849. Twelve years later they saw the same phenomenon

in their own country when the manner in which the peasants had

been emancipated in Russia seemed to them to be a cynical travesty of

all their plans and hopes. Such men as these found the plodding genius

of Chernyshevsky-his attempts to work out sped fie solutions to specific

problems in terms of concrete statistical data; his constant appeals to

facts; his patient efforts to indicate attainable, practical, immediate

ends rather than desirable states of affairs to which there was no

visible road; his flat, dry, pedestrian style, his very dullness and lack

of inspiration-more serious and ultimately more inspiring than the

noble flights of the romantic idealists of the 1 84os. His relatively low

social origin (he was the son of a parish priest) gave him a natural

affinity with the humble folk whose condition he was seeking to

analyse, and an abiding distrust, later to turn into fanatical hatred, of

all liberal theorists, whether in Russia or the west. These qualities

made Chernyshevsky a natural leader of a disenchanted generation of

socially mingled origins, no longer dominated by good birth, embittered

by the failure of their own early ideals, by government repression, by

the humiliation of Russia in the Crimean war, by the weakness,

heartlessness, hypocrisy, and chaotic incompetence of the ruling class.

To these tough-minded, socially insecure, angry, suspicious young

radicals, contemptuous of the slightest trace of eloquence or 'literature',

Chernyshevsky was a father and a confessor as neither the aristocratic

and ironical Herzen nor the wayward and ultimately frivolous

Bakunin could ever become.

Like all populists, Chernyshevsky believed in the need to preserve

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the peasant commune and to spread its principles to industrial production. He believed that Russia could profit directly by learning from the scientific advances of the west, without going through the agonies of

an industrial revolution. 'Human development is a form of chronological unfairness,' Herzen had once characteristically observed, 'since lat�mers are able to profit by the labours of their predecessors

without paying the same price.' 'History is fond of her grandchildren,'

Chernyshevsky repeated after him, 'for it offers them the marrow of

the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in

breaking.' For Chernyshevsky history moved along a spiral, in

Hegelian triads, since every generation tends to repeat the experience

not of its parents, but of its grandparents, and repeats it at a 'higher

level'.

But it is not this historicist element in his doctrine that bound its

spell upon the populists. They were most of all influenced by his

acute distrust of reforms from above, by his belief that the essence of

history was a struggle between the classes, above all by his conviction

(which derives nothing, so far as we know, from Marx, but draws upon

socialist sources common to both) that the state is always the instrument

of the dominant class, and cannot, whether it consciously desires this

or not, embark on those necessary reforms, the success of which would

end its own domination. No order can be persuaded to undertake its

own dissolution. Hence all attempts to convert the tsar, all attempts

to evade the horrors of revolution, must (he concluded in the early 6os)

remain necessarily vain. There was a moment in the 'late sos when,

like Herzen, he had hoped for reforms from above. The final form of

the Emancipation, and the concessions which the government had

made to the landowners, cured him of this illusion. He pointed out

with a good deal of historical justification that liberals, who hoped to

influence the government by Fabian tactics, had thus far merely

succeeded in betraying both the peasants and themselves: first they

compromised themselves with the peasants by their relations with their

masters; after that, the governing class found little difficulty whenever

this suited their convenience in representing them as false friends to

the peasants, and turning the latter against them. This had occurred

in both France and Germany in 1 849. Even if the moderates withdrew

in time, and advocated violent measures, their ignorance of conditions

and blindness to the peasants' and workers' actual needs usually led

them to advocate Utopian schemes which in the end cost their

followers a terrible price.

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R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M

Chemyshevsky had evolved a simple form of historical materialism,

according to which social factors determined political ones, and not

vice versa. Consequently, he held with Fourier and Proudhon that

liberal and parliamentary ideals merely evaded the central issues: the

peasants and the workers needed food, shelter, boots; as for the right

to vote, or to be governed by liberal constitutions, or to obtain

guarantees of personal liberty, these meant little to hungry and halfnaked men. The social revolution must come first: appropriate political reforms would follow of themselves. For Chernyshevsky the principal

lesson of 1 848 was that the western liberals, the brave no less than the

cowardly, had demonstrated their political and moral bankruptcy, and

with it that of their Russian disciples- Herzen, Kavelin, Granovsky

and the rest. Russia must pursue her own path. Unlike the Slavophils,

and like the Russian Marxists of the next generation, he maintained

with a wealth of economic evidence that the historical development

of Russia, and in particular the peasant mir, were in no sense unique,

but followed the social and economic laws that governed all human

societies. Like the Marxists (and the Comtian positivists), he believed

that such laws could be discovered and stated; but unlike the Marxists,

he was convinced that by adopting western techniques, and educating

a body of men of trained and resolute wills and rational outlook,

Russia could 'leap over' the capitalist stage of social development, and

transform her village communes and free cooperative groups of craftsmen into agricultural and industrial associations of producers who would constitute the embryo of the new socialist society. Technological progress did not, in his view, automatically break up the peasant commune: 'savages can be taught to use Latin script and

safety-matches'; factories can be grafted on to workers' arttls without

destroying them; large-scale organisation could eliminate exploitation,

and yet preserve the predominantly agricultural nature of the Russian

economy.1

1 In II pDpulismo russo - translated into English as Roots of Rtr10/utiD11

(London, 1 960)- Franco Venturi very aptly quotes populist statistics (which

seem plausible enough) according to which the proportion of peasants to

that of landowners in the 1 86os was of the order of 3.f.I:I, while the land

owned by them stood to that of their masters in the ratio of I: 1 1 :, and their

incomes were :·s=97"S; as for industry, the proportion of city workers to

peasants was 1 :100. Given these ligures, it is perhaps not surprising that

Man: should have declared that his prognosis applied to the western economies,

and not 11ecessarily to that of the Russians, even though his Russian disciples

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

Chernyshevsky believed in the decisive historical role of the application of science to Ii(e, but, unlike Pisarev, did not regard individual enterprise, still less capitalism, as indispensable to this process. He

retained enough of the Fourierism of his yC"uth to look upon the free

associations of peasant communes and craftsmen's artels as the basis

of all freedom and progress. But at the same time, like the Saint

Simonians, he was convinced that little would be achieved without

collective action-state socialism on a vast scale. These incompatible

beliefs were never reconciled ; Chernyshevsky's writings contain

statements both in favour of and against the desirability of large-scale

industry. He is similarly ambivalent about the part to be played (and

the part to be avoided) by the state as the stimulator and controller of

industry, about the function of managers of large collective industrial

enterprises, about the relations of the public and private sectors of the

economy, and about the political sovereignty of the democratically

elected parliament and its relation to the state as the source of centralised

economic planning and control.

The outlines of Chernyshevsky's social programme remained vague

or inconsistent, and often both. It is the concrete detail which.

founded as it was on real experience, spoke directly to the representatives of the great popular masses, who had at last found a spokesman and interpreter of their own needs and feelings. His deepest aspirations

and emotions were poured into What is to he done?, a social Utopia

which, grotesque as a work of art, had a literally epoch-making effect

on Russian opinion. This didactic novel described the 'new men' of

the free, morally pure, cooperative socialist commonwealth of the

future; its touching sincerity and moral passion bound their spell upon

the imaginations of the idealistic and guilt-stricken sons of prosperous

parents, and provided them with an ideal model in the light of which

an entire generation of revolutionaries educated and hardened itself

to the defiance of existing laws and conventions �d to the acceptance

of exile and death with sublime unconcern.

Chernyshevsky preached a naive utilitarianism. Like James Mill.

and perhaps Bentham, he held that basic human nature was a fixed,

physiologically analysable pattern of natural processes and faculties,

ignored this concession, and insisted that capitalism was making enormous

atridea in Russia. and would soon obliterate the differences that divided it

from the west. Plekhanov (who stoutly denied that Chemyshevsky �w:·ever

been a populist) elaborated this theory; Lenin acted upon it.

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RU SSIAN POP U L I S M

and that the maximisation of human happiness could therefore be

scientifically planned and realised. Having decided that imaginative

writing and criticism were the only available media in Russia for

propagating radical ideas, he filled the Contemporary, a review which

he edited together with the poet Nekrasov, with as high a proportion

of direct socialist doctrine as could be smuggled in under the guise of

literature. In his work he was helped by the violent young critic

Dobrolyubov, a genuinely gifted man ofletters (which Chemyshevsky

was not) who, at times, went even further in his passionate desire to

preach and educate. The aesthetic views of the two zealots were

severely practical. Chernyshevsky laid it down that the function of

art was to help men to satisfy their wants more rationally, to disseminate knowledge, to combat ignorance, prejudice, and the antisocial passions, to improve life in the most literal and narrow sense of these words. Driven to absurd consequences, he embraced them gladly.

Thus he explained that the chief value of marine paintings was that

they showed the sea to those who, like, for instance, the inhabitants

of central Russia, lived too far away from it ever to see it for themselves; or that his friend and patron Nekrasov, because by his verse he moved men to greater sympathy with the oppressed than other

poets had done, was for this reason the greatest Russian poet, living or

dead. His earlier collaborators, civilised and fastidious men of letters

like Turgenev and Botkin, found his grim fanaticism increasingly

difficult to bear. Turgenev could not long live with this art-hating

and dogmatic schoolmaster. Tolstoy despised his dreary provincialism,

his total lack of aesthetic sense, his intolerance, his rationalism, his

maddening self-assurance. But these very qualities, or, rather, the

outlook of which they were characteristic, helped to make him the

natural leader of the 'hard' young men who had succeeded the idealists

of the I 84-os. Chernyshevsky's harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating

sentences, his preoccupation with concrete detail, his self-discipline,

his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow-men, the

grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute

i ndustry, the hatred of style or of any concessions to the graces, the

unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness,

indifference to the claims of private life, innocence, personal kindness,

pedantry, disarming moral charm, capacity for self-sacrifice, created

the image that later became the prototype of the Russian revolutionary

hero and martyr. More than any other publicist he was responsible

for drawing the final line between 'us' and 'them'. All his life he

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

preached that there must be no compromise with 'them', that the war

must be fought to the death and on every front; that there were no

neutrals; that, so long as this war was being fought, no work could

be too trivial, too repulsive, or too tedious for a revolutionary to

perform. His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations

of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin, who admired him

devotedly.

In spite of his emphasis on economic or sociological arguments,

the basic approach, the tone and outlook of Chernyshevsky and of the

populists generally, is moral, and at times religious. These men believed

in socialism not because it was inevitable, nor because it was effective,

not even because it alone was rational, but because it was just. Concentrations of political power, capitalism, the centralised state, trampled on the rights of men and crippled them morally and spiritually.

The populists were stern atheists, but socialism and orthodox Christian

values coalesced in their minds. They shrank from the prospect of

industrialism in Russia because of its brutal cost, and they disliked the

west because it had paid this price too heartlessly. Their disciples, the

populist economists of the 1 88os and 90s, Danielson and Vorontsov

for example, for all their strictly economic arguments about the possibility of capitalism in Russia (some of which seem a good deal sounder than their Marxist opponents have represented them as being), were

in the last analysis moved by moral revulsion from the sheer mass of

suffering that capitalism was destined to bring, that is to say, by a

refusal to pay so appalling a price, no matter how valuable the results.

Their successors in the twentieth century, the Socialist-Revolutionaries,

sounded the note which runs through the whole of the populist

tradition in Russia: that the purpose of social action is not the power

of the state, but the welfare of the people; that to enrich the state and

provide it with military and industrial power, while undermining the

health, the education, the morality, the general cultural level of its

citizens, was feasible but wicked. They compared the progress of the

United States, where, they maintained, the welfare of the individual

was paramount, with that of Prussia, where it was not. They committed

themselves to the view (which goes back at least to Sismondi) that the

spiritual and physical condition of the individual citizen matters more

than the power of the state, so that if, as often happened, the two stood

in inverse ratio to one another, the rights and welfare of the individual

must come first. They rejected as historically false the proposition that

only powerful states could breed good or happy citizens, and as morally

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R U S S IAN P O P U L I S M

unacceptable the proposition that to lose oneself i n the life and welfare

of one's society is the highest form of individual self-fulfilment.

Belief in the primacy of human rights over other claims is the first

principle that separates pluralist from centralised societies, and welfare

states, mixed economies, 'New Deal' policies, from one-party governments, 'closed' societies, 'five-year plans', and, in general, forms of life built to serve a single goal that transcends the varied goals of differing

groups or individuals. Chernyshevsky was more fanatical than most

of his followers in the 18705 and 8os. and believed far more strongly

in organisation, but even he neither stopped his ears to the cries for

immediate help which he heard upon all sides, nor believed in the need

to suppress the wants of individuals who were making desperate efforts

to escape destruction, in the interests of even the most sacred and overmastering purpose. There were times when he was a narrow and unimaginative pedant, but at his worst he was never impatient, or

arrogant, or inhumane, and was perpetually reminding his readers and

himself that, in their zeal to help, the educators must not end by

bullying their would-be beneficiaries; that what 'we' -the rational

intellectuals-think good for the peasants may not be what they themselves want or need, and that to ram 'our' remedies down 'their'

throats is not permitted. Neither he nor Lavrov, nor even the most

ruthlessly Jacobin among the proponents of terror and violence, ever

took cover behind the inevitable direction of history as a justification

of what would otherwise have been patently unjust or brutal. If

violence was the only means to a given end, then there might be circumstances in which it was right to employ it; but this must be justified in each case by the intrinsic moral claim of the end-an increase in

happiness, or solidarity, or justice, or peace, or some other universal

human value that outweighs the evil of the means-never by the view

that it was rational and necessary to march in step with history,

ignoring one's scruples and dismissing one's own 'subjective' moral

principles because they were necessarily provisional, on the ground

that history herself transformed all moral systems and retrospectively

justified only those principles which survived and succeeded.

The mood of the populists, particularly in the 1 87os, can fairly be

described as religious. This group of conspirators or propagandists saw

itself, and was seen by others, as constituting a dedicated order. The

first condition of membership was the sacrifice of one's entire life to

the movement, both to the particular group and party, and to the cause

of the revolution in general. But the notion of the dictatorship of the

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party o r o f i ts leaders over individual lives-in particular over the

beliefs of individual revolutionaries-is not part of this doctrine, and is

indeed contrary to its entire spirit. The only censor over the individual's

acts is his individual conscience. If one has promised obedience to the

leaders of the party, such an oath is sacred, but it extends only to the

specific revolutionary objectives of the party and not beyond them,

and ends with the completion of whatever specific goals the party

exists to promote-in the last resort, the revolution. Once the revolution has been made, each individual is free to act as he thinks fit, since discipline is a temporary means and not an end. The populists did

indeed virtually invent the conception of the party as a group of

professional conspirators with no private lives, obeying a total discipline

-the core of the 'hard' professionals as against mere"sympathisers and

fellow-travellers; but this sprang from the specific situation that

obtained in tsarist Russia, and the necessity and conditions for

effective conspiracy, and not from belief in hierarchy as a fonn of

life desirable or even tolerable in itself. Nor did the conspirators justify

their acts by appealing to a cosmic process which sanctified their every

act, since they believed in freedom of human choice and not in

determinism. The later Leninist conception of the revolutionary party

and its dictatorship, although historically it owed much to these

trained martyrs of an earlier day, sprang from a very different outlook.

The young men who poured into the villages during the celebrated

summer of 1 874 only to meet with non-comprehension, suspicion,

and often outright hostility on the part of the peasants, would have

been profoundly astonished and indignant if they had been told that

they were to look upon themselves as the sacred instruments of history,

and that their acts were therefore to be judged by a moral code

different from that common to other men.

The populist movement was a failure. 'Socialism bounced off people

like peas from a wall,' wrote the celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky

to his fellow-revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1 876, two years after

the original wave of enthusiasm had died down. 'They listen to our

people as they do to the priest' - respectfully, without understanding,

without any effect upon their actions.

There is noise in the capitals

The prophets thunder

A furious war of words is waged

But in the depths, in the heart of Russia,

There all is still, there is ancient peace.

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RU SSIAN P O P U L I S M

These lines by Nekrasov convey the mood of frustration which

followed the failure of the sporadic effons made by the revolutionary

idealists in the late 6os and early 70s, peaceful propagandists and

isolated terrorists alike-of whom Dostoevsky painted so violent a

picture in his novel The Possessed. The government caught these men,

exiled them, imprisoned them, and by its obstinate unwillingness to

promote any measures to alleviate the consequences of an · inadequate

land reform drove liberal opinion towards sympathy with the revolutionaries. They felt that public opinion was on their side, and finally resorted to organised terrorism. Yet their ends always remained

moderate enough. The open letter which they addressed to the new

Emperor in r 881 is mild and liberal in tone. 'Terror', said the celebrated revolutionary Vera Figner many years later, 'was intended to create opportunities for developing the faculties of men for service to

society.' The society for which violence was to blast the way was to

be peaceful, tolerant, decentralised and humane. The principal enemy

was still the state.

The wave of terrorism reached its climax with the assassination of

Alexander II in r 88 1 . The hoped-for revolution did not break out.

The revolutionary organisations were crushed, and the new Tsar

decided upon a policy of extreme repression. In this he was, on the

whole, supported by public opinion, which recoiled before the

assassination of an Emperor who had, after all, emancipated the

peasants, and was said to have been meditating other liberal measures.

The most prominent leaders of the movemen.t were executed or exiled ;

lesser figures escaped abroad, and the most gifted of those who were

still free- Plekhanov and Aksel rod-gradually moved towards Marxism.

They felt embarrassed by Marx's own concession that Russia could in

principle avoid passing through a capitalist stage even without the aid

of a communist world revolution -a thesis which Engels conceded far

more grudgingly and with qualifications-and maintained that Russia

had in fact already entered the capitalist stage. They declared that

since the development of capitalism in Russia was no more avoidable

than it had been in its day in the west, nothing was to be gained by

averting one's face from the 'iron' logic of history, and that for these

reasons, so far from resisting industrialisation, socialists should encourage it, indeed profit by the fact that it, and it alone, could breed the army of revolutionaries which would be sufficient to overthrow the

capitalist enemy-an army to be formed out of the growing city proletariat, organised and disciplined by the very conditions of its labour.

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R U S S IAN T H INKERS

The vast leap forward in industrial development made by Russia

in the I 89os seemed to support the Marxist thesis. It proved attractive

to revolutionary intellectuals for many reasons: because it claimed to

be founded on a scientific analysis of the laws of history which no

society could hope to evade; because it claimed to be able to prove

that, although, as the pattern of history inexorably unfolded itself,

much violence, misery, and injustice were bound to occur, yet the

story would have a happy ending. Hence the conscience of those who

felt guilty because they acquiesced in exploitation and poverty, or at

any rate because they did not take active-that is, violent- steps to

alleviate or prevent them, as populist policy had demanded, felt

assuaged by the 'scientific' guarantee that the road, covered though it

might be with the corpses of the innocent, led inevitably to the gates

of an earthly paradise. According to this view, the expropriators

would find themselves expropriated by the sheer logic of human

development, although the course of history might be shortened, and

the birth-pangs made easier, by conscious organisation, and above all

an increase in knowledge (that is, education) on the part of the workers

and their leaders. This was particularly welcome to those who, understandably reluctant to continue with useless terrorism which merely led to Siberia or the scaffold, now found doctrinal justification for

peaceful study and the life of ideas, which the intellectuals among them

found far more congenial than bomb-throwing.

The heroism, the disinterestedness, the personal nobility of the

populists were often admitted by their Marxist opponents. They were

regarded as worthy forerunners of a truly rational revolutionary party,

and Chernyshevsky was sometimes accorded an even higher status and

was credited with insights of genius-an empirical and unscientific,

but instinctively correct, approach to truths of which only Marx and

Engels could provide the demonstration, armed as they were with the

instrument of an exact science to which neither Chernyshevsky, nor

any other Russian thinker of his day, had yet attained. Marx and

Engels grew to be particularly indulgent to the Russians: they were

praised for having done wonders for amateurs, remote from the west

and using home-made tools. They alone in Europe had, by I 88o,

created a truly revolutionary situation in their country; nevertheless

it was made clear, particularly by Kautsky, that this was no substitute

for professional methods and the use of the new machinery provided

by scientific socialism. Populism was written off as an amalgam of

unorganised moral indignation and Utopian ideas in the muddled

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R U S S IAN POP U L I S M

heads of self-taught peasants, well-meaning university intellectuals and

other social casualties of the confused interim between the end of an

obsolescent feudalism and the beginning of the new capitalist phase in

a backward country. Marxist historians still tend to describe it as a

movement compounded of systematic misinterpretation of economic

facts and social realities, noble but useless individual terrorism, and

spontaneous or ill-directed peasant risings-the necessary but pathetic

beginnings of real revolutionary activity, the prelude to the real play, a

scene of naive ideas and frustrated practice destined to be swept away

by the new revolutionary, dialectical science heralded by Plekhanov

and Lenin.

What were the ends of populism? Violent disputes took place about

means and methods, about timing, but not about ultimate purposes.

Anarchism, equality, a full life for all, these were universally accepted.

It is as if the entire movement-the motley variety of revolutionary

types which Franco Venturi describes in his book1 so well and so

lovingly-Jacobins and moderates, terrorists and educators, Lavrovists

and Bakuninists, 'troglodytes', 'recalcitrants', 'country folk', members

of 'Land and Liberty' and of 'The People's Will', were all dominated

by a single myth : that once the monster was slain, the sleeping

princess- the Russian peasantry-would awaken without further ado

and live happily for ever after.

This -is the movement of which Franco Venturi has written the

history, the fullest, clearest, best-written and most impartial account

of a particular stage of the Russian revolutionary movement in any

language. Yet if the movement was a failure, if it was founded on

false premises and was so easily extinguished by the tsarist police,

has it more than historical interest- that of a narrative of the life and

death of a party, of its acts and its ideas? On this question Venturi

discreetly, as behoves an objective historian, offers no direct opinion.

He tells the story in chronological sequence; he explains what occurs;

he describes origins and consequences; he illuminates the relations of

various groups of populists to one another, and leaves moral and

political speculation to others. His work is not an apologia either for

populism or its opponents. He does not praise or condemn, and seeks

only to understand. Success in this task plainly needs no further reward.

And yet one may, at moments, wonder whether populism should be

dismissed quite as easily as it still is today, both by communist and

1 op. cit. (p. 227, note 1 above).

..

235

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

bourgeois historians. Were the populists so hopelessly in error? Were

Chernyshevsky and Lavrov-and Marx who listened to them-totally

deluded?

Was capitalism, in fact, inevitable in Russia? The consequences of

accelerated industrialisation prophesied by the neo-populist economists

in the 1 88os, namely a degree of social and economic misery as great

as any undergone in the west during the Industrial Revolution, did

occur, both before, and, at an increasing tempo, after the October

revolution. Were they avoidable? Some writers on history consider

this type of question to be absurd as such. What happened, happened.

We are told that if we are not to deny causality in human affairs, we

must suppose that what took place can only have done so precisely as it

did ; to ask what might have happened if the situation had been

different is the idle play of the imagination, not worthy of serious

historians. Yet this academic question is not without acute contemporary relevance. Some countries, such as, for example, Turkey, India, and some states in the Middle East and Latin America, have adopted a

slower tempo of industrialisation and one less likely to bring immediate

ruin to backward areas before they can be rehabilitated, and have done

so in conscious preference to the forced marches of collectivisation

upon which, in our day, the Russians, and after them the Chinese,

have embarked. Are these non-Marxist governments inescapably set

upon a path to ruin ? For it is populist ideas which lie at the base of

much of the socialist economic policy pursued by these and other

countries today.

When Lenin organised the Bolshevik revolution in 1 9 1 7, the

technique that he adopted, prima facie at least, resembled those commended by the Russian Jacobins, Tkachev and his followers, who had learnt them from Blanqui or Buonarroti, more than any to be found

in the writings of Marx or Engels, at any rate after 1 8 5 1 . It was not,

after all, full-grown capitalism that was enthroned in Russia in 1 9 1 7.

Russian capitalism was a still growing force, not yet in power, struggling

against the fetters imposed upon it by the monarchy and the bureaucracy, as it had done in eighteenth-century France. But Lenin acted as if the bankers and industrialists were already in control. He acted

and spoke as if this w::os so, but his revolution succeeded not so much

by taking over the centres of finance and industry (which history

should already have undermined) but by a seizure of strictly political

power on the part of a determined and trained group of professional

revolutionaries, precisely as had been advocated by Tkachev. If

2J6

R U S S IAN POPU L I S M

Russian capitalism had reached the stage which, according to Marxist

historical theory, it had to reach before a proletarian revolution could

be successful, the seizure of power by a determined minority, and a

very small one at that-a mere Putsch-could not, ex hypothesi, have

retained it long. And this, indeed, is what Plekhanov said over and

over again in his bitter denunciations of Lenin in I 9 I 7 : ignoring his

argument that much may be permitted in a backward country provided

that the results were duly saved by orthodox Marxist revolutions successfully carried out soon after in the industrially more advanced west.

These conditions were not fulfilled; Lenin's hypothesis proved

historically irrelevant; yet the Bolshevik revolution did not collapse.

Could it be .that the Marxist theory of history was mistaken? Or had

the Mensheviks misunderstood it, and concealed from themselves the

anti-democratic tendencies which had always been implicit in it? In

which case were their charges against Mikhailovsky and his friends

wholly just? By I 9 I 7 their own fears of the Bolshevik dictatorship

rested upon the same basis. Moreover, the results of the October

revolution turned out to be oddly similar to those which Tkachev's

opponents had prophesied that his methods must inevitably produce:

the emergence of an elite, wielding dictatorial power, designed in

theory to wither away once the need for it had gone; but, as the

populist democrats had said over and over again, in practice more

likely to grow in aggressiveness and strength, with a tendency towards

self-perpetuation which no dictatorship seems able to resist.

The populists were convinced that the death of the peasant commune would mean death, or at any rate a vast setback, to freedom and equality in Russia; the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were

their direct descendants, transformed this into a demand for a form of

decentralised, democratic self-government among the peasants, which

Lenin adopted when he concluded his temporary alliance with them

in October I 9 I 7. In due course the Bolsheviks repudiated this

programme, and transformed the cells of dedicated revolutionariesperhaps the most original contribution of populism to revolutionary practice-into the hierarchy of centralised political power, which the

populists had steadily and fiercely denounced until they were themselves finally, in the form of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, proscribed and annihilated. Communist practice owed much, as Lenin was always ready to admit, to the populist movement; for it borrowed

the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to

serve the precise purpose which it had been invented to resist.

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237

Tolstoy and Enlightenment

'Two T H I N GS are always said about Count Tolstoy,' wrote the

celebrated Russian critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay published

in the mid-1 87os, 'that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction

and a bad thinker. This . . . has become a sort of axiom needing no

demonstration.' This almost universal verdict has reigned, virtually

unchallenged, for something like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky's

attempt to question it remained relatively isolated. Tolstoy dismissed

his left-wing ally as a routine liberal hack, and expressed surprise that

anyone should take an interest in him. This was characteristic, but

unjust. The essay which its author called The Right Hand and the

Left Hand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and convincing defence of

Tolstoy on both intellectual and moral grounds, directed mainly

against the liberals and socialists who saw in the novelist's ethical

doctrines, and in particular in his glorification of the peasants and

natural instinct, and his constant disparagement of scientific culture,

a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism which discredited the liberal

cause, and played into the hands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovsky rejected this view, and in the course of his long and careful attempt to sift the enlightened grain from the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy's

opinions, reached the conclusion that there was an unresolved, and

unavowed, conflict in the great novelist's conceptions both of human

nature and of the problems facing Russian and western civilisation.

Mikhailovsky maintained that, so far from being a 'bad thinker',

Tolstoy was no less acute, clear-eyed and convincing in his analysis of

ideas than of instincts or characters or actions. In his zeal for his

paradoxical thesis-paradoxical certainly at the time at which he wrote

it- Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far; but in substance it seems to

me to be right; or at any rate, more right than wrong, and my own

remarks are no more than an extended gloss on it.

Tolstoy's opinions are always subjective and can be (as, for example,

in his writings on Shakespeare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.

But the questions which in his most didactic essays he tries to answer

are nearly always cardinal questions of principle, always first-hand,

238

TOLSTOY AND EN L I G HTEN M ENT

and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplified and naked form in

which he usually presents them, than those of more balanced and

'objective' thinkers. Direct vision always tends to be disturbing.

Tolstoy used this gift to the full to destroy both his own peace and

that of his readers. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedly simple

but fundamental questions, to which he did not himself-at any rate in

the 1 86os and- 7os-possess the answers; that gave him the reputation

of being a 'nihilist'. Yet he certainly had no desire to destroy for the

sake of destruction. He only desired, more than anything else in the

world, to know the truth. How annihilating this passion can be is

shown by others who have chosen to cut below the limits set by the

wisdom of their generation: Machiavelli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author

of the Book of Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted into any of

the public movements of his own, or indeed any other age. The only

company to which Tolstoy belongs is the subversive one of questioners

to whom no answer has been, or seems likely to be, given-at least no

answer which they or those who understand them will begin to accept.

As for Tolstoy's positive ideas-and they varied less during his long

life than has sometimes been represented-they are not at all unique:

they have something in common with the French Enlightenment of

the eighteenth century; something with those of the twentieth century;

little with those of his own times. In Russia he belonged to neither

of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion in that

country during his youth. He was not a radical intellectual, with his

eyes turned to the west; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believer in a

Christian and nationalist monarchy. His views cut across these

categories. Like the radicals he had always condemned political

repression, arbitrary violence, economic exploitation, and all that

creates and perpetuates inequality among men. But the rest of the

'W esternising' outlook- the heart of the ideology of the intelligentsiathe overwhelming sense of civic responsibility, the belief in natural science as the door to all truth, in social and political reform, in

democracy, material progress, secularism-this celebrated amalgam

Tolstoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. He believed in individual

liberty and, indeed, in progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.1

1 Education for him is 'an activit)l based on the human need for equality

and the immutable law of the advance of education', which he interprets as

the constant equalisation of knowledge, knowledge which is always growing

because I know what the child does not know; moreover, each generation

..

'-39

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

He looked with contempt on liberals and socialists, and with even

greater hatred on the right-wing parties of his time. His closest affinity,

as has often been remarked, is with Rousseau ; he liked and admired

Rousseau's views more than those of any other modern writer. Like

Rousseau, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, and believed that

man was born innocent, and had been ruined by his own bad institutions; especially by what passed for education among civilised men.

Like Rousseau again, he put the blame for this process of decadence

largely on the intellectuals-the self-appointed elites of experts, sophisticated coteries remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life. These men are damned because they have all but lost the

most precious of all human possessions, the capacity with which all

men are born-to see the truth, the immutable, eternal truth which

only charlatans and sophists represent as varying in different circumstances and times and places- the truth which is visible fully only to the innocent eye of those whose hearts have not been corrupted children, peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride. the simple, the good. Education, as the west understands it, ruins innocence. That

is why children resist it bitterly and instinctively: that is why it has to

be rammed down their throats, and, like all coercion and violence,

maims the victim and at times destroys him beyond redress. Men crave

for truth by nature; therefore true education must be of such a kind

that children and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorb it readily

and eagerly. But to understand this, and to discover how to apply this

knowledge, the educated must put away their intellectual arrogance,

and make a new beginning. They must purge their minds of theories,

of false, quasi-scientific analogies between the world of men and the

world of animals, or of men and inanimate things. Only then will they

be able to re-establish a personal relationship with the uneducated-a

relationship which only humanity and love can achieve.

In modern times only Rousseau, and perhaps Dickens, seem to him

to have seen this. Certainly the people's condition will never be

improved until not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but the 'progressists',

as Tolstoy called them, the vain and doctrinaire intelligentsia, are

knows what the previous generations have thought, whereas they do not

know what future generations would think. The equality is between the

teacher and the taught; this desire for equality on the part of both is itself

for him the spring of progress- progress in the sense of'advance in knowledge'

of what men are and what they should do.

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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G H TENM ENT

'prised off the people's necks' -the common people's, and the children's

too. So long as fanatical theorists bedevil education, little is to be hoped

for. Even the old-fashioned village priest-so Tolstoy maintains in

one of his early tracts-was less harmful : he knew little and was clumsy,

idle, and stupid; but he treated his pupils as human beings, not as

scientists treat specimens in a laboratory; he did what he could; he

was often corrupt, ill-tempered, unjust, but these were human

'natural' -vices, and therefore their effects, unlike those of machinemade modern instructors, inflicted no permanent injury.

With these ideas it is not surprising to find that Tolstoy was personally happier among the Slavophil reactionaries. He rejected their ideas; but at least they seemed to him to have some contact with

reality-the land, the peasants, traditional ways of life. At least they

believed in the primacy of spiritual values and the futility of trying

to change men by changing the more superficial sides of their life

by political or constitutional reform. But the Slavophils also believed

in the Orthodox Church, in the unique historical destiny of the Russian

people, the sanctity of history as a divinely ordained process, and therefore the justification of many absurdities because they were native and ancient, and therefore instruments in the divine tactic; they lived

by a Christian faith in the great mystical body-at once community

and church-of the generation of the faithful, past, present, and yet

unborn. Intellectually Tolstoy repudiated this, temperamentally he

responded to it all too strongly. He understood well only the nobility

and the peasants; and the former better than the latter; he shared

many of the instinctive beliefs of his country neighbours; like them

he had a natural aversion to all forms of middle-class liberalism: the

bourgeoisie scarcely appears in his novels. His attitude to parliamentary

democracy, the rights of women, universal suffrage, was not very

different from that of Cobbett or Carlyle or Proudhon or D. H.

Lawrence. He shared deeply the Slavophil suspicions of all scientific

and theoretical generalisations as such, and this created a bridge which

made personal relations with the Moscow Slavophils congenial to

him. But his intellect was not at one with his instinctive convictions.

As a thinker he had profound affinities with the eighteenth-century

philosopher. Like them he looked upon the patriarchal Russian state

and Church, which the Slavophils defended, as organised and hypocritical conspiracies. Like the great thinkers of the Enlightenment he looked for values not in history, nor in the sacred missions of nations

or cultures or churches, but in the individual's own personal experience.

;l

R U S S IAN TH INKERS

Like them, too, ht! bdieved in eternal (and not in historically evolving)

truths and values, and rejected with both hands the romantic notion of

race or nation or culture as creative agents, still more the Hegelian

conception of history as the self-realisation of self-perfecting reason

incarnated in men or in movements or in institutions (ideas which

had deeply influenced his generation) -all his life he looked on this as

cloudy metaphysical nonsense.

This clear, cold, uncompromising realism is quite explicit in the

notes and diaries and letters of his early life. The reminiscences of

those who knew him as a boy or as a student in the University of

Kazan reinforce this impression. His character was deeply conservative, with a streak of caprice and irrationality; but his mind remained calm, logical, and unswerving; he followed the argument easily and

fearlessly to whatever extreme it led him -a typically, and sometimes

fatally, Russian combination of qualities. What did not satisfy his

critical sense, he rejected. He left the University of Kazan because

he decided that the professors were incompetent and dealt with trivial

issues. Like Helvetius and his friends in the mid-eighteenth century,

Tolstoy denounced theology, history, the teaching of dead languagesthe entire classical curriculum-as an accumulation of data and rules that no reasonable man could wish to know. History particularly

irritated him as a systematic attempt to answer non-existent questions

with all the real issues carefully left out: 'history is like a deaf man

replying to questions which nobody puts to him', he announced to

a startled fellow-student, while they were both locked in the university detention room for some minor act of insubordination. The first extended statement of his full 'ideological' position belongs to the

I 86os: the occasion for it was his decision to compose a treatise on

education. All his intellectual strength and all his prejudice went into

this attempt.

In 1 86o, Tolstoy, then thirty-two years old, found himself in one

of his periodic moral crises. He had acquired some fame as a writer:

Sebastopol, Childhood, Adolescence and Youth, two or three shorter tales,

had been praised by the critics. He was on terms of friendship with

some of the most gifted of an exceptionally talented generation of

writers in his country-Turgenev, Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev,

Pisemsky, Fet. His writing struck everyone by its freshness, sharpness,

marvellous descriptive power, and the precision and originality of its

images. His style was at times criticised as awkward and even barbarous; but he was unquestionably the most promising of the younger 2.42

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN M ENT

prose writers; he had a future; yet his literary friends felt reservations

about him. He paid visits to the literary salons, both right- and leftwing (political divisions had always existed and were becoming sharper in Petersburg and Moscow), but he seemed at ease in none of them.

He was bold, imaginative, independent. But he was not a man of

letters, not fundamentally concerned with problems of literature and

writing, still less of writers; he had wandered in from another, less

intellectual, more aristocratic and more primitive world. He was a

well-born dilettante; but that was nothing new: the poetry of Push kin

and his contemporaries, unequalled in the history of Russian literature,

had been created by amateurs of genius. It was not his origin but his

unconcealed indifference to the literary life as such -to the habits or

problems of professional writers, editors, publicists-that made his

friends among the men of letters feel uneasy in his presence. This

worldly, clever young officer could be exceedingly agreeable; his love

for writing was genuine and very deep; but at literary gatherings he

was contemptuous, formidable and reserved; he did not dream of

opening his heart in a milieu dedicated to intimate, unending selfrevelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, disconcerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He no longer, it was true, lived the life of an

aristocratic officer. The wild nights on which the young radicals looked

with hatred and contempt as characteristic of the dissipated habits of

the reactionary jeunesse diJree no longer amused him. He had married

and settled down, he was in love with his wife, and became for a time

a model (if occasionally exasperating) husband. But he did not trouble

to conceal the fact that he had far more respect for all forms of real

life-whether of the free Cossacks in the Caucasus, or that of the rich

young Guards officers in Moscow with their race-horses and balls

and gypsies- than for the world of books, reviews, critics, professors,

political discussions, and talk about ideals, opinions, and literary values.

Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrelsome and at times unexpectedly

savage; with the result that his literary friends treated him with

nervous respect, and, in the end, drew away from him; or perhaps he

abandoned them. Apart from the poet Fet, who was an eccentric and

deeply conservative country squire himself, Tolstoy had no intimates

among the writers of his own generation. His breach with Turgenev

is well known. He was even remoter from the other litterateurs; he

liked Nekrasov better than his poetry; but then Nekrasov was an

editor of genius and admired and encouraged Tolstoy from his earliest

beginnings.

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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

The sense o f the contrast between life and literature haunted

Tolstoy. It made him doubt his own vocation as a writer. Like other

young Russians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by

the appalling condition of the peasants. Mere reflection or denunciation seemed to him a way of evading action. He must act, he must start with his own estate. Like the eighteenth-century radicals he

was convinced that men were born equal and were made unequal by

the way in which they were brought up. He established a school for

the boys of his village; and, dissatisfied with the educational theories

then in vogue in Russia, decided to go abroad to study western methods

in theory and in practice. He derived a great deal from his visits to

England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany-including the

title of his greatest novel. But his conversations with the most advanced

western authorities on education, and observation of their methods,

had convinced him that these methods were at best worthless, at worst

harmful, to the children upon whom they were practised. He did not

stay long in England and paid little attention to its 'antiquated' schools.

In France he found that learning was almost entirely mechanical-by

rote. Prepared questions, lists of dates, for example, were answered

competently, because they had been learnt by heart. But the same

children, when asked for the same facts from some unexpected angle,

often produced absurd replies, which showed that their knowledge

meant nothing to them. The schoolboy who replied that the murderer

of Henri IV of France was Julius Caesar seemed to him typical : the

boy neither understood nor took an interest in the facts he had stored

up: at most all that was gained was a mechanical memory.

But the true home of theory was Germany. The pages which

Tolstoy devotes to describing teaching and teachers in Germany rival

and anticipate the celebrated pages in War and Ptact in which he

makes savage fun of admired experts in another field-the German

strategists employed by the Russian army-whom he represents as

grotesque and pompous dolts.

In Yasnaya Po/ypna, a journal which he had had privately printed

in 1 861-2, Tolstoy speaks of his educational visits to the west and, by

way of example, gives a hair-raising (and exceedingly entertaining)

account of the latest methods of teaching the alphabet, used by a

specialist trained in one of the most advanced of the German teachers'

seminaries. He describes the pedantic, immensely self-satisfied schoolmaster, as he enters the room, and notes with approval that the children are seated at their desks, crushed and obedient, in total silence,

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as prescribed by German rules of behaviour. 'He casts a look round the

class, and knows already what it is that they ought to understand; he

knows this, and he knows what the children's souls are made of, and

much else that the seminary has taught him.' He is armed with the

latest and most progressive pedagogic volume, called Das Fischbuch. It

contains pictures of a fish.

'What is this, dear children?' 'A fish,' replies the brightest. 'No.'

And he will not rest until some child says that what they see is not a

fish, but a book. That is better. ' And what do books contain?' 'Letters,'

says the boldest boy. 'No, no,' says the schoolmaster sadly, 'you really

must think of what you are saying.' By this time the children are

beginning to be hopelessly demoralised : they have no notion of what

they are meant to say. They have a confused and perfectly correct

feeling that the schoolmaster wants them to say something unintelligible-that the fish is not a fish-that whatever it is he wants them to say, is something they will never think of. Their thoughts begin to

stray. They wonder (this is very Tolstoyan) why the teacher is wearing

spectacles, why he is looking through them instead of taking them off,

and so_ on. The teacher urges them to concentrate, he harries and

tortures them until he manages to make them say that what they see

is not a fish, but a picture, and then, after more torture, that the

picture represents a fish. If that is what he wants them to say, would

it not be easier, Tolstoy asks, to make them learn this piece of profound

wisdom by heart, instead of tormenting them with the Fischhuch

method, which so far from causing them to think 'creatively', merely

stupefies them?

The genuinely intelligent children know that their answers are

always wrong; they cannot tell why; they only know that this.is so;

while the stupid, who occasionally provide the right answers, do not

know why they are praised. All that the German pedagogue is doing

is to feed dead human material -or rather living human beings- into

a grotesque mechanical contraption invented by fanatical fools who

think that this is a way of applying scientific method to the education

of men. Tolstoy assures us that his account (of which I have only

quoted a short fragment) is not a parody, but a faithful reproduction

of what he saw and heard in the advanced schools of Germany and in

'those schools in England that have been fortunate enough to acquire

these wonderful . . . methods'.

Disillusioned and indignant, Tolstoy returned to his Russian estate

and began to teach the village children himself. He huilt schools,

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

continued to study, reject and denounce current doctrines of education,

published periodicals and pamphlets, invented new methods of learning

geography, zoology, physics; composed an entire manual of arithmetic

of his own, inveighed against all methods of coercion, especially those

which consisted of forcing children against their will to memorise

facts and dates and figures. In short, he behaved like an original,

enlightened, energetic, opinionated, somewhat eccentric eighteenthcentury landowner who had become a convert to the doctrines of Rousseau or the abbe Mably. His accounts of his theories and experiments fill two stout volumes in the pre-revolutionary editions of his collected works. They are still fascinating, .if only because they contain

some of the best descriptions of village life and especially of children,

both comical and lyrical, that even he had ever composed. He wrote

them in the 1 86os and 70s when he was at the height of his creative

powers. His overriding didactic purpose is easily forgotten in the

unrivalled insight into the twisting, criss-crossing pattern of the

thoughts and feelings of individual village children, and the marvellous

concreteness and imagination with which their talk and behaviour,

and physical nature round them, are described. And side by side with

this direct vision of human experience, there run the clear, firm

dogmas of a fanatically doctrinaire eighteenth-century rationalistdoctrines not fused with the life that he describes, but superimposed upon it, like windows with rigorously symmetrical patterns drawn

upon them, unrelated to the world on which they open, and yet

achieving a kind of illusory artistic and intellectual unity with it,

owing to the unbounded vitality and constructive genius of the

writing itself. It is one of the most extraordinary performances in the

history of literature.

The enemy is always the same: experts, professionals, men who

claim special authority over other men. Universities and professors

are a frequent target for attack. There are intimations of this already

in the section entitled 'Youth' of his earlier autobiographical novel.

There is something eighteenth-century, reminiscent both of Voltaire

and of Bentham, about Tolstoy's devastating accounts of the dull and

incompetent professors and the desperately bored and obsequious

students in Russia in his time. The tone is unusual in the nineteenth

century: dry, ironical, didactic, mordant, at once withering and entertaining; the whole based on the contrast between the harmonious simplicity of nature and the self-destructive complications created by

the malice or stupidity of men-men from whom the author feels

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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTE N M ENT

himself detached, whom he affects not to understand, and mocks from

a distance.

We are at the earliest beginnings of a theme which grew obsessive

in Tolstoy's later life; that the solution to all our perplexities stares

us in the face-that the answer is about us everywhere, like the light

of day, if only we would not close our eyes or look everywhere but

at what is there, staring us in the face, the clear, simple, irresistible

truth.

Like Rousseau and Kant and the believers in natural law, Tolstoy

was convinced that men have certain basic material and spiritual needs,

in all places, at all times. If these needs are fulfilled, they lead harmonious lives, which is the goal of their nature. Moral, aesthetic, and other spiritual values are objective and eternal, and man's inner

harmony depends upon his correct relationship to these. Moreover, all

his life he defended the proposition-which his own novels and sketches

do not embody-that human beings are more harmonious in childhood

than under the corrupting influences of education in later life; and

also that simple people (peasants, Cossacks, and so on) have a more

'natural' and correct attitude towards these basic values than civilised

men; and that they are free and independent in a sense in which

civilised men are not. For (he insists on this over and over again)

peasant communities are in a position to supply their own material and

spiritual needs out of their own resources, provided that they are not

robbed or enslaved by oppressors and exploiters; whereas civilised men

need for their survival the forced labour of others-serfs, slaves, the

exploited masses, called ironically 'dependants', because their masters

depend on them. The masters are parasitic upon others: they are

degraded not merely by the fact that to enslave and exploit others is a

denial of such objective values as justice, equality, human dignity, love

- values which men crave to realise because they cannot help this,

because they are men-but for the further, and to him even more

important reason that to live on robbed or borrowed goods, and so fail

to be self-subsistent, falsifies 'natural' feelings and perceptions, corrodes

men morally, and makes them both wicked and miserable. The human

ideal is a society of free and equal men, who live and think by the

light of what is true and right, and so are not in conflict with each

other or themselves. This is a form-a very simple one-of the classical

doctrine of natural law, whether in its theological or secular, liberalanarchist form. To it Tolstoy adhered all his life; as much in his

'secular' period as after his 'conversion'. His early stories express this

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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

vividly. The Cossacks Lukashka and Uncle Yeroshka are morally

superior, as well as happier and aesthetically more harmonious beings

than Olenin in The Cossacks; Olenin knows this; indeed that is the

heart of the situation. Pierre in War and Peace and Levin in Anna

Karenina have a sense of this in simple peasants and soldiers; so does

Nekhlyudov in The Morning of a Landowner. This conviction fills

Tolstoy's mind to a greater and greater degree, until it overshadows

all other issues in his later works: Resurrection and The Death of Ivan

Ilich are not intelligible without it.

Tolstoy's critical thought constantly revolves round this central

notion-the contrast between nature and artifice, truth and invention.

When, for instance, in the I 89os he laid down conditions of excellence

in art (in the course of an introduction to a Russian translation of

Maupassant's stories), he demanded of all writers, in the first place

the possession of sufficient talent; in the second that the subject itself

must be morally important; and finally that they must truly love (what

was worthy of love) and hate (what was worthy of hate) in what they

describe- 'commit' themselves-retain the- direct moral vision of childhood, and not maim their natures by practising self-imposed, selflacerating and always illusory impartiality and detachment-or, still worse, deliberate perversion of 'natural' values. Talent is not given

equally to all men; but everyone can, if he tries, discover eternal,

unchanging attributes-what is good and what is bad, what is important

and what is trivial. Only false-'made-up'-theories delude men and

writers about this, and so distort their lives and creative activity.

Tolstoy applies his criterion literally, almost mechanically. Thus

Nekrasov, according to him, treated subjects of profound importance,

and possessed superb skill as a writer; but his attitude towards his

suffering peasants and crushed idealists, .-emained chilly and unreal.

Dostoevsky's subjects lack nothing in seriousness, and his concern is

profound and genuine; but the first condition is unfulfilled : he is

diffuse and repetitive; he does not know how to tell the truth clearly

and then to stop. Turgenev, on the other hand, is judged to be both

an excellent writer and to stand in a real, morally adequate, relationship to his subjects; but he fails on the second count : the subjects are too circumscribed and trivial -and for this no degree of integrity or

skill can compensate. Content determines form, never form content;

and if the content is too small or trivial, nothing will save the work of

the artist. To hold the opposite of this-to believe in the primacy of

form-is to sacrifice truth; to end by producing works that are con-

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trived. There is no harsher word in Tolstoy's entire critical vocabulary

than 'made-up', indicating that the writer did not truly experience or

imagine, but merely 'coinposed'-'made up'-that which he is purporting to describe.

So, too, Tolstoy maintained that Maupassant, whose gifts he

admired greatly, betrayed his genius precisely owing to false and

vulgar theories of this kind; yet he remained, none the less, a good

writer to the degree to which, like Balaam, although he might have

meant to curse virtue, he could not help discerning what was good;

and this perception attracted his love to it, and forced him against his

own will towards the truth. Talent is vision, vision reveals the truth,

truth is eternal and objective. To see the truth about nature or about

conduct, to see it directly and vividly as only a man of genius (or a

simple human being or a child) can see it, and then to deny or tamper

with the vision in cold blood, no matter for the sake of what, is

monstrous, unnatural; a symptom of a deeply diseased character.

·

Truth is discoverable: to follow it is to be good, inwardly sound,

harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or

composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the

educated minority-what Tolstoy calls the professors, the barons, and

the bankers-are opposed to those of the majority-the peasants, the

poor; each side is indifferent to, or mocks, the values of the other.

Even those who, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin, realise the

spuriousness of the values of the professors, barons, ·and bankers, and

the moral decay in which their false education has involved them, even

those who are truly contrite cannot, despite Slavophil pretensions, go

native and 'merge' with the mass of the common people. Are they too

corrupt ever to recover their innocence? Is their case hopeless? Or

can it be that civilised men have acquired (or discovered) certain true

values of their own, values which barbarians and children may know

nothing of, but which they, the civilised, cannot lose or forget, even if,

by some impossible means, they could transform themselves into

peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek?

This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy's

life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns

conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongs to the minority of

barons, bankers, professors. He knows the symptoms of his condition

only too well. He cannot, for example, deny his passionate love for the

music of Mozart or Chopin or the poetry of Tyutchev or Pushkin,

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the ripest fruits of civilisation. He needs, he cannot do without, the

printed word and all the elaborate· paraphernalia of the culture in

which such lives are lived and such works of art are created. But what

is the use of Pushkin to village boys, when his words are not intelligible

to them? What real benefits has the invention of printing brought the

peasants? We are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate societies

('that is, make them more corrupt'), that it was the written word that

has promoted the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy denies

this: the government would have done the same without books or

pamphlets. Pushkin's Boris Godunov pleases only him, Tolstoy: but

to the peasants it means nothing. The triumphs of civilisation? The

telegraph tells him about his sister's health, or about the prospects of

King Otto I of Greece; but what benefits do the masses gain from it?

Yet it is they who pay and have always paid for it all; they know this

well. When peasants kill doctors in the 'cholera riots' because they

regard them as poisoners, what they do is no doubt wrong, but these

murders are no accident: the instinct which tells the peasants who

their oppressors are is sound, and the doctors belong to that class.

When Wanda Landowska played to the villagers of Yasnaya Polyana,

the great majority of them remained unresponsive. Yet can it be

doubted that it is the simple people who lead the least broken lives,

immeasurably superior to the warped and tormented lives of the rich

and educated?

The common people, Tolstoy asserts in his early educational tracts,

are self-subsistent not only materially but spiritually-folksong, the

Iliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself, and are therefore

intelligible to all men everywhere, as the marvellous poem Silmtium

by Tyutchev, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Symphony is not. If

there is an ideal of man, it lies not in the future, but in the past.

Once upon a time there was the Garden of Eden and in it dwelt the

uncorrupted human soul as the Bible and Rousseau conceived it, and

then came the Fall, corruption, suffering, falsification. It is mere

blindness (Tolstoy says over and over again) to believe, as liberals or

socialists-the progressives-believe, that the golden age is still before

us, that history is the story of improvement, that material advance in

natural science or material skills coincides with real moral advance.

The truth is the reverse of this.

The child is closer to the ideal harmony than the grown man, and

the simple peasant than the tom, 'alienated', morally and spiritually

unanchored and self�estructive parasites who form the civilised elite.

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From this doctrine springs Tolstoy's notable anti-individualism: and

in particular his diagnosis of the individual's will as the source of

misdirection and perversion of 'natural' human tendencies, and hence

the conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer's doctrine of the

will as the source of frustration) that to plan, organise, rely on science,

try to create rational patterns of life in accordance with rational

theories, is to swim against the stream of nature, to dose one's eyes

to the saving truth within us, to torture facts to fit artificial schemata,

and torture human beings to fit social and economic systems against

which their natures cry out. From the same source, too, comes the

obverse of this: Tolstoy's faith in an intuitively grasped direction of

things as not merely inevitable, but objectively-providentially-good;

and therefore belief in the need to submit to it: his quietism.

This is one aspect of his teaching-the most famous, the most

central idea of the Tolstoyan movement-and it runs through all his

works, imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossadts and Family

Happiness to his last religious tracts. This is the doctrine which the

liberals and Marxists condemned. It is in this mood that Tolstoy

maintains that to imagine that heroic personalities determine events

is a piece of colossal megalomania and self-deception; his narrative is

designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Tsar Alexander,

or of the aristocratic and bureaucratic society in Anna Kartnina, or of

the judges and official persons in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness

and intellectual impotence of historians and philosophers who try to

explain events by employing concepts like 'power' which is attributed

to great men, or 'influence' ascribed to writers, orators, preacherswords, abstractions which, in his view, explain nothing, being themselves far more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not begin to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations that do not explain are, for

Tolstoy, a symptom of the disruptive and self-inflated intellect, the

faculty that destroys innocence and leads to false ideas and the ruin of

human life.

That is the strain, inspired by Rousseau and present in early

romanticism, which inspired primitivism in art and in life, not in

Russia alone. Tolstoy imagines that he and others can find the path

to the truth about how one should live by observing simple people, by

the study of the gospels.

His other strain is the direct opposite of this. Mikhailovsky says,

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with justice, that Olenin cannot, charmed as he is by the Caucasus

and the Cossack idyll, transform himself into a Lukashka, return to

the childlike harmony, which in his case has long been broken. Levin

knows that if he tried to become a peasant this could only be a grotesque

farce, which the peasants would be the first to perceive and deride; he

and Pierre and Nikolay Rostov know obscurely that in some sense

they have something to give that the peasants have not. Tolstoy tells

the educated reader that the peasant

needs what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour

has given you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to sufferthen give him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in need of it • . .

do not bury in the earth the talent given you by history . . .

Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive. Progress can occur: we

can learn from what happened in the past, as those who lived in that

past could not. It is true that we live in an unjust order. But this

itself creates direct obligations. Those who are members of the

civilised elite, cut off as they tragically are from the mass of the people,

have the duty to attempt to re-create broken humanity, to stop

exploiting them, to give them what they most need-education, knowledge, material help, a capacity for living better lives. Levin in A""a Karmi,a, as Mikhailovsky remarks, takes up where Nikolay Rostov

in War anti Ptact left off. They are not quietists, and yet what they

do is right. The emancipation of the peasants, in Tolstoy's view,

although it did not go far enough, was nevertheless an act of willgood-will-on the part of the government, and now it is necessary to teach peasants to read and write and grasp the rules of arithmetic,

something which they cannot do for themselves; to equip them for

the use of freedom. I cannot merge myself with the mass of peasants;

but I can at least use the fruit of the unjustly obtained leisure of

myself and my ancestors-my education, knowledge, skills- for the

benefit of those whose labour made it �ible.

This is the talent I may not bury. I must work to promote a just

society in accordance with those objective standards which all men,

except the hopelessly corrupt, see and accept, whether they live by

them or not. The simple see them more clearly, the sophisticated

more dimly, but all men can see them if they try; indeed to be able

to see them is part of what it is to be a man. When injustice is perpetrated, I have an obligation to speak out and act against it; nor may artists any more than others sit with folded hands. What makes good

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writers good is ability to see truth-social and individual, material and

spiritual-and so present it that it cannot be escaped. Tolstoy holds

that Maupassant, for example, is doing precisely this, despite himself

and his aesthetic fallacies. He may, because he is a corrupt human

being, take the side of the bad against the good, write about a worthless

Paris seducer with greater sympathy than he feels for his victims. But

provided that he tells the truth at a level that is sufficiendy profoundand men of talent cannot avoid doing this-he will face the reader with fundamental moral questions, whether he means to do this or not,

questions which the reader can neither escape nor answer without

rigorous and painful self-examination.

This, for Tolstoy, opens the path to regeneration, and is the proper

function of art. Vocation-talent-is obedience to an inner need: to

fulfil it is the artist's purpose and his duty. Nothing is more false than

the view of Pie artist as a purveyQr, or a craftsman whose sole function

it is to create a beautiful thing, as Flaubert, or Renan, or Maupassantl

maintain. There is only one human goal, and it is equally binding on

all men, landowners, doctors, barons, professors, bankers, peasants: to

tell the truth, and be guided by it in action, that is, to do good, and

persuade others to do so. That God exists, or that the Iliad is beautiful,

or that men have a right to be free and also equal, are all eternal

and absolute truths. Therefore we must persuade men to read the Iliad

and not pornographic French novels, and to work for an equal society,

not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercion is evil; men have

always known this to be true; therefore they must work for a society

in which there will be no wars, no prisons, no executions, in any

circumstances, for any reason; for a society in which individual

freedom exists to the maximum degree. By his own route Tolstoy

arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in

common with that of the Russian populists, with whom, but for their

doctrinaire socialism, and their beliefin science and faith in the methods

of terrorism, Tolstoy's attitude had much in common. For what he

now appeared to be advocating was a programme of action, not of

quietism; this programme underlay the educational reform that he

1 Tolstoy is moved to indignation by Maupa.ssant's celebrated dictum

(which he quotes) that the business of the artist is not to entertain, delight,

move, utonish, cause his reader to dream, reflect, smile, weep, or shudder,

but (ft�irt J rjulf•t t:Aost tie 6tt�• tlt�fll '" jof'fllt 9•i rJfJMI t:Oflrlitfltlr" It fllin3t t1' .pns rJOirt ltfllplrt�flltfll.

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R U SSIAN T H INKERS

attempted to carry out. He strove to discover, collect, expound eternal

truths, awaken the spontaneous interest, the imagination, love,

curiosity of children or simple folk; above all to liberate their 'natural'

moral, emotional and intellectual forces, which he did not doubt, as

Rousseau did not doubt, would achieve harmony within men and

between them, provided that we eliminate everything that might maim,

cramp and kill them.

This programme-that of making possible the free self-development

of all human faculties-rests on one vast assumption: that there exists

at least one path of development on which these faculties will neither

conflict with each other, nor develop disproportionately-a sure path

to complete harmony in which everything fits and is at peace; with

the corollary that knowledge of man's nature gained from observation

or introspection or moral intuition, or from the study of the lives and

writings of the best and wisest men of all ages, can show us this path.

This is not the place for considering how far the doctrine is compatible

with ancient religious teachings or modern psychology. The point I

wish to stress is that it is, above all, a programme of action, a declaration of war against current social values, against the tyranny of states, societies, churches, against brutality, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy,

weakness, above all against vanity and moral blindness. A man who

has fought a good fight in this war will thereby expiate the sin of

having been a hedonist and an exploiter, and the son and beneficiary

of robbers and oppressors.

This is what Tolstoy believed, preached, and practised. His 'conversion' altered his view of what was good and what was evil. It did not weaken his faith in the need for action. His belief in the principles

themselves never wavered. The enemy entered by another door:

Tolstoy's sense of reality was too inexorable to keep out tormenting

doubts about how these principles-no matter how true themselvesshould be applied. Even though I believe some things to be beautiful or good, and others to be ugly and evil, what right have I to bring up

others in the light of my convictions, when I know that I cannot help

liking Chopin and Maupassant, while these far better men-peasants

or children-do not? Have I, who stand at the end of a long period of

elaboration-of generations of civilised, unnatural living-have I the

right to touch thnr souls?

To seek to influence someone is to engage in a morally suspect

enterprise. This is obvious in the case of the crude manipulation of

one man by another. But in principle it holds equally of education. All

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educators seek to shape the minds and lives of the educated towards a

given goal, or to resemble a given model. But if we-the sophisticated

members of a deeply corrupt society-are ourselves unhappy, inharmonious, gone astray, what can we be doing but trying to change children born healthy into our own sick semblance, to make cripples

of them like ourselves? We are what we have become, we cannot help

our love of Pushkin's verse, of Chopin's music; we discover that

children and peasants find them unintelligible or tedious. What do we

do? We persist, we 'educate' them until they too appear to enjoy these

works or, at least, see why we enjoy them. What have we done? We

find the works of Mozart and Chopin beautiful only because Mozart

and Chopin were themselves children of our decadent culture, and

therefore their words speak to our diseased minds; but what right have

we to infect others, to make them as corrupt as ourselves? We can

see the blemishes of other systems. We see all too clearly how the

human personality is destroyed by Protestant insistence on obedience,

by Catholic stress on emulation, by the appeal to self-interest and the

importance of social position or .rank on which Russian education,

according to Tolstoy, is based. Is it not, then, either monstrous

arrogance or a perverse inconsistency to behave as if our own favoured

systems of education-something recommended by Pestalozzi, or the

Lancaster method, systems which merely reRect their inventors'

civilised, and consequently perverted, personalities-are necessarily

superior, or less destructive, than what we condemn so readily

and justly in the superficial French or the stupid and pompous

Germans?

How is this to be avoided? Tolstoy repeats the lessons of Rousseau's

Emile. Nature: only natur� will save us. We must seek to understand

what is 'natural', spontaneous, uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with

itself and other objects in the world, and clear paths for development

on these lines; not seek to alter, to force into a mould. We must

listen to the dictates of our stiRed original nature, not look on it as

mere raw stuff upon which to impose our unique personalities and

powerful wills. To defy, to be Promethean, to create goals and build

worlds in rivalry with what our moral sense knows to be eternal

truths, given once and for all to all men, truths in virtue of which

they are men and not beasts-that is the monstrous sin of pride, committed by all reformers, all revolutionaries, all men judged great and effective. And no less by government officials, or by country squires

who, from liberal convictions or simply caprice or boredom, interfere

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with the lives of the peasants.1 Do not teach; learn: that is the sense

of Tolstoy's essay, written nearly a hundred years ago, 'Who should

learn to write from whom: should peasants' children learn from us,

or should we learn from peasants' children?', and of all the accounts

published in the 1 86os and 7os, written with his customary freshness,

attention to detail, and unapproachable power of direct perception, in

which he gives examples of stories written by the children in his

village, and speaks of the awe which he felt while in the presence of

the act of pure creation, in which, he _assures us, he played no part

himself. These stories would only be spoilt by his 'corrections'; they

see� to him far more profound than any of the works of Goethe; he

explains how deeply ashamed they make him of his own superficiality,

vanity, stupidity, narrowness, lack of moral and aesthetic sense. If one

can help children and peasants, it is only by making it easier for them

to advance freely along their own instinctive path. To direct is to

spoil. Men are good and need only freedom to realise their goodness.

'Education', writes Tolstoy in 1 862., 'is the action of one man on

another with a view to causing this other person to acquire certain

moral habits (we say: they have brought him up to be a hypocrite, a

robber or a good man. The SP.rtans brought up brave men, the

French bring up one-sided and self-satisfied persons).' But this is

speaking of-and using-human beings as so much raw material that

we model; this is what 'bringing up' to be like this or like that means.

We are evidently ready to alter the direction spontaneously followed

by the souls and wills of others, to deny their independence-in favour

of what? Of our own corrupt, false, or at best, uncertain values? But

this involves always some degree of moral tyranny. In a wild moment

of panic Tolstoy wonders whether the ultimate motive of the educator

is not envy, for the root of the educator's passion for his task is 'envy

of the purity of the child and the desire to make the child like himself,

that is, more corrupt'. What has the entire history of education been?

All philosophers of education, from Plato to Kant, sought one goal :

'to free education from the oppression of the chains of the historic

past'. They want 'to guess at what men need and then build their new

1 Mikhailovsky maintains that in Polilusllla, one of Tolstoy's best stories,

composed during the period of the educational tracts, he represents the

tragic death of the hero as ultimately due to the wilful interference with the

lives of her peasants on the part of'the well-meaning, but vain and foolish,

landoWDer. His argument is highly convincing.

zs6

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN MENT

schools on what, less or more correctly, they take this to be'. They

struck off one yoke only to put another in its place. Certain scholastic

philosophers insisted on Greek because that was the language of

Aristotle, who knew the truth. But, Tolstoy continues, Luther denied

the authority of the Church Fathers and insisted on inculcating the

original Hebrew, because he lmn» that that was the language in which

God had revealed eternal truths to men. Bacon looked to empirical

knowledge of nature, and his theories contradicted those of Aristotle.

Rousseau proclaimed his faith in life, life as he conceived it, and not in

theories.

But about one thing they were all agreed: that one must liberate

the young from the blind despotism of the old; and each immediately

substituted his own fanatical, enslaving dogma in its place. If I am sure

that I know the truth and that all else is error, does that alone entitle

me to superintend the education of another? Is such certainty enough?

Whether or not it disagrees with the certainties of others? By what right

do I put a wall round the pupil, exclude all external influences, and try

to mould him as I please, into my own or somebody else's image?

The answer to this question, Tolstoy passionately says to the

progressives, must be 'Yes' or 'No': 'If it is "Yes", then the Jews'

synagogue, the church school, has as much legitimate right to exist

as all our universities.' He declares that he sees no moral difference, at

least in principle, between the compulsory Latin of the traditional

establishments and the compulsory materialism with which the radical

professors indoctrinate their captive audiences. There might indeed be

something to be said for the things that the liberals delight in denouncing: education at home, for example. For it is surely natural that parents should wish their children to resemble them. Again there is a

case for a religious upbringing, for it is natural that believers should

want to save all other human beings from what they, at any rate, are

certain must be eternal damnation. Similarly the government is

entitled to train men, for society cannot survive without some sort of

government, and governments cannot exist without some qualified

specialists to serve them.

But what is the basis of' liberal education' in schools and universities,

staffed by men who do not even claim to be sure that what they teach

is true? Empiricism? The lessons of history? The only lesson that history

teaches us is that all previous educational systems have proved to be

despotisms founded on falsehoods, and later roundly condemned. Why

should the twenty-first century not look back on us in the nineteenth

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R U S S I AN T H I N K ERS

with the same scorn and amusement as that with which we now loolt:

on medieval schools and universities? If the history of education is

the history merely of tyranny and error, what right have we to carry

on this abominable farce? And if we are told that it has always been

so, that it is nothing new, that we cannot help it, and must do our bestis this not like saying that murders have always taken place, so that we might as well go on murdering, even though we have now discovered

what it is that makes men murder?

In these circumstances, we should be villains if we did not say at

least so much as this: that since, unlike the Pope or Luther or modem

positivists, we do not ourselves claim to base our education (or other

forms of interference with human beings)on the knowledge of absolute

truth, we must at least stop torturing others in the name of what we

do not know. All we can know for certain is what men actually want.

Let us at least have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our

doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others,

children or adults, require, by taking off the spectacles of tradition,

prejudice, dogma, and making it possible for ourselves to know men

as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically,

and understanding them and their lives and their needs, one by one

individually. Let us at least try to provide them with what they ask

for, and leave them as free as possible. Give them Bildung (for which

he produces a Russian equivalent, and points out with pride that there

is none in French or English)-that is to say, seek to influence them

by precept and by the example of our own lives; but do not apply

'education' to them, which is essentially a method of coercion, and

destroys what is most natural and sacred in man-the capacity for

knowing and acting for himself in accordance with what he thinks

to be true and good -the power and the right of self-direction.

But he cannot let the matter rest there, as many a liberal has tried

to do. For the question immediately arises: how are we to contrive

to leave the schoolboy and the student free? By being morally neutral?

By imparting only factual knowledge, not ethical, or aesthetic, or

social or religious doctrine? By placing the 'facts' before the pupil,

and letting him form his own conclusions, without seeking to influence

him in any direction, for fear that we might infect him with our own

diseased outlooks? But is it really possible for such neutral communications to occur between men? Is not every human communication a conscious or unconscious impression of one temperament, attitude to life, scale of values, upon another? Are men ever so

258

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN M ENT

thoroughly insulated from each other, that the careful avoidance of

more than the minimum degree of social intercourse will leave them

unsullied, absolutely free to see truth and falsehood, good and evil,

beauty and ugliness, with their own, and only their own eyes? Is this

not an absurd conception of individuals as creatures who can be kept

pure from all social influence-absurd in the world even of Tolstoy's

middle years-even, that is, without the new knowledge of human

beings that we have acquired today, as the result of the labours of

psychologists, sociologists, philosophers? We live in a degenerate

society: only the pure can rescue us. But who will educate the educators? Who is so pure as to know how, let alone be able, to heal our world or anyone in it?

Between these poles-on one side facts, nature, what there is; on

the other duty, justice, what there should be; on one side innocence,

on the other education; between the claims of spontaneity and those

of obligation, between the injustice of coercing others, and the injustice

of leaving them to go their own way, Tolstoy wavered and struggled

all his life. And not only he, but all those populists and socialists and

idealistic students who in Russia 'went to the people', and could not

decide whether they went to teach or to learn, whether the 'good of

the people' for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives was what

'the people' in fact desired, or something that only the reformers

knew to be good for them, what the 'people' should desire-would

desire if only they were as educated and wise as their championsbut, in fact, in their benighted state, often spurned and violently resisted.

These contradictions, and his unswerving recognition of his failure

to reconcile or modify them, are, in a sense, what gives their special

meaning both to Tolstoy's life and to the morally agonised, didactic

pages of his art. He furiously rejected the compromises and alibis of

his liberal contemporaries as mere feebleness and evasion. Yet he

believed that a final solution to the problems of how to apply the

principles of Christ must exist, even though neither he nor anyone

else had wholly discovered it. He rejected the very possibility that

some of the tendencies and goals of which he speaks might be literally

both real and incompatible. Historicism versus moral responsibility;

quietism versus the duty to resist evil; teleology or a causal order

against the play of chance and irrational force; spiritual harmony,

simplicity, the mass of the people on the one hand, and the irresistible

attraction of the culture of minorities and its art on the other; the

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259

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

corruption of the civilised portion of society on one side, and its dir•.:ct

duty to raise the masses of the people to its own level on the other;

the dynamism and falsifying influence of passionate, simple, one-sided

faith, as against the clear-sighted sense of the complex facts and

inevitable weakness in action which flows from enlightened scepticism

-all these strains are given full play in the thought of Tolstoy. His

adhesion to them appears as a series of inconsistencies in his system

because it may be that the conflicts exist in fact and lead to collisions

in real life.1 Tolstoy is incapable of suppressing, or falsifying, or

explaining away by reference to dialectical or other ·�eeper' levels of

thought, any truth when it presents itself to him, no matter what

this entails, where it leads, how much it destroys of what he most

passionately longs to believe. Everyone knows that Tolstoy placed

truth highest of all the virtues. Others have said this too, and have

celebrated her no less memorably. But Tolstoy is among the few who

have truly earned that rare right: for he sacrificed all he had upon her

altar-happiness, friendship, love, peace, moral and intellectual certainty, and, in the end, his life. And all she gave him in return was doubt, insecurity, self-contempt and insoluble contradictions.

In this sense, although he would have repudiated this violently, he

is a martyr and a hero-perhaps the most richly gifted of all-in the

tradition of European enlightenment. This seems a paradox; but then

his entire life bears witness to the proposition to the denial of which

his last years were dedicated: that the truth is seldom wholly simple

or clear, or as obvious as it may sometimes seem to the eye of the

common observer.

1 Some Marxist critics, notably Lukacs, represent these contradictions u

the expression in art of the crisis in Russian feudalism and in particular in

the condition of the peasants whO&e predicament Tolstoy is held to reflect.

This seems to me an over-optimistic view: the destruction of Tolstoy's world

should have made his dilemmu obsolete. The reader can judge for himself

whether this is so.

Fathers and Children

T U R G E N E V A N D T H E LI B E R A L

P R E D I C A M E N T

You do not, I see, quite undentand the Ruaaian public. Ita

character is determined by the condition of Russian society,

which contain11, imprisoned within it, fresh forces seething

and bunting to break out; but crushed by heavy repression

and unable to escape, they produce gloom, bitter depression, apathy. Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censonhip, there is still o.ome life and forward movement.

This is why the writer's calling enjoys such respect among

u11, why literary success is so r:uy here even when there ia

little talent . • . This is why, especially amongst us, univenal attention ia paid • • . to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's

gifts • . . The public • . • sees in Russian writen its only

leaden, defenden and savioun from dark autocracy,

Orthodozy and the national way of life • • • 1

Vissarion Belinsky (0�" Lmtr '' G'gel, 1 5 July 1 84-7)

O N 9 October 1 883 Ivan Turgenev was buried, as he had wished.

in St Petersburg. near the grave of hi.s admired friend. the critic

• Belinsky's words-s•motltrz!Jtlflit, prtlfi()J/tlflit ; flllrDJ,,sl' -echo the

official patriotic formula invented by a Minister of Education early in the

reign of Nicholas I. The last of these words-flllrotlfloJI'-was evidendy intended

as the Russian equivalent of Yollstum; it was used in thil context to contrat

the traditional 'folkways' of the common people with the imported, 'arti6cial'

constructions of'wiaeacres' inJluenced by western enlightenment. In practice

it connoted official patriotism as well as such institutions as serfdom, the

hierarchy of estates, and the duty of implicit obedience to the Emperor and

his Government. Belinsky'• letter is a bitter indictment of Gogol for uaing his

genius 'sincerely or insincerely' to serve the cause of obecurantiam and reaction. It was on the charge of reading the letter at a secret meeting of a aubvenive group that Dostoevsky wu arrC:sted and condemned to death.

261

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R U S S IAN THINKERS

Visarion Belinsky. His body was brought from Paris after a brief

ceremony near the Gare du Nord, at which Ernest Renan and Edmond

About delivered appropriate addres5e5. The burial service took place

in the presence of representative$ of the Imperial Government, the

intelligentsia, and workers' organisations, perhaps the first and last

occasion on which these groups peacefully met in Russia. The times

were troubled. The wave of terrorist acts had culminated in the

assassination of Alexander II two years earlier; the ringleaders of the

conspiracy had been hanged or sent to Siberia, but there was still

great unrest, especially among students. The Government feared that

the funeral procession might turn into a political demonstration. The

press received a secret circular from the Ministry of the Interior

instructing it to print only ofticial information about the funeral

without disclosing that any such instructions had been received.

Neither the St Petersburg municipality nor the workers' organisations

were pennitted to identify themselves in the inscriptions on their

wreaths. A literary gathering at which Tolstoy was to have spoken

about his old friend and rival was cancelled by government order. A

revolutionary leaflet was distributed during the funeral procession, but

no official notice of this was taken, and the occasion seems to have

passed off without incident. Yet these precautions, and the uneasy

abnosphere in which the funeral was conducted, may surprise those

who see Turgenev as Henry James or George Moore or Maurice

Baring saw him, and as most of his readers perhaps see him still: as a

writer of beautiful lyrical prose, the author of nostalgic idylls of

country life, the degiac poet of the last enchanbnents of decaying

country houses and of their ineffective but irresistibly attractive

inhabitants, the incomparable story-teller with a marvellous gift for

describing nuances of mood and feeling, the poetry of nature and of

love, gifts which have given him a place among the foremost writers

of his time. In the French memoirs of the time he appears as It douz

gltmt, as his friend Edmond de Goncoun had called him, the good

giant, gende, charming, infinitely agreeable, an entrancing talker,

known as 'The Siren' to some of his Russian companions, the admired

friend of Flauben and Daudet, George Sand and Zola and Mau�t,

the most welcome and delightful of all the hobituls of the s11/rm of

his intimate life-long companion, the singer Pauline Viardot. Yet the

Russian Government had some grounds for its fears. They had not

welcomed Turgenev's visit to Russia, more particularly his meetings

with students, two years before, and had found a way of.conveying

:16:1

FAT H E R S AND C H I LDREN

this to him in unambiguous terms. Audacity was not among his

attributes; he cut his visit short and returned to Paris.

The Government's nervousness is not surprising, for Turgenev was

something more than a psychological observer and an exquisite stylist.

Like virtually every major Russian writer of his time, he was, all his

life, profoundly and painfully concerned with his·country's condition

and destiny. His novels constitute the best account of the social and

political development of the small, but influential, elite of the liberal

and radical Russian youth of his day -of it and of its critics. His books,

from the point of view of the authorities in St Petersburg, were by

no means safe. Yet, unlike his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and

Dostoevsky, he was not a preacher and did not wish to thunder at

his generation. He was concerned, above all, to enter into, to understand, views, ideals, temperaments, both those which he found sympathetic and those by which he was puzzled or repelled. Turgenev possessed in a highly developed form what Herder called Einfiihlen

(empathy), an ability to enter into beliefs, feelings and attitudes alien

and at times acutely antipathetic to his own, a gift which Renan had

emphasised in his eulogy;1 indeed, some of the young Russian revolutionaries freely conceded the accuracy and justice of his portraits of them. During much of his life he was painfully preoccupied with the

controversies, moral and political, social and personal, which divided

the educated Russians of his day; in particular, the profound and

bitter conflicts between Slavophil nationalists and admirers of the west,

conservatives and liberals, liberals and radicals, moderates and fanatics,

realists and visionaries, above all between old and young. He tried to

stand aside and see the scene objectively. He did not always succeed.

But because he was an acute and responsive observer, self-critical and

self-effacing both as a man and as a writer, and, above all, because he

was not anxious to bind his vision upon the reader, to preach, to

convert, he proved a better prophet than the two self-centred, angry

literary giants with whom he is usually compared, and discerned the

birth of social issues which have grown world-wide since his day.

Many years after Turgenev's death the radical novelist Vladimir

Korolenko, who declared himself a 'fanatical' admirer, remarked that

Turgenev 'irritated . . . by touching painfully the most exposed nerves

of the live issues of the day'; that he excited passionate love and

1 For the text of the Discours delivered on 1 October 1 883 see I. Tourgut!neff, Otuflm JmriJrts, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1 88 5), pp. 297-302.

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R U SSIAN TH INKERS

respect and violent criticism, and 'was a storm centre . . . yet he knew

the pleasures of triumph too; he understood others, and others understood him'.1 It is with this relatively neglected aspect of Turgenev's writing, which speaks most directly to our own time, that I intend to

deal.

I

By temperament Turgenev was not politically minded. Nature, personal relationships, quality of feeling- these are what he understood best, these, and their expression in art. He loved every manifestation

of art and of beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done. The conscious

use of art for ends extraneous to itself, ideological, didactic or utilitarian, and especially as a deliberate weapon in the class war, as demanded by the radicals of the I 86os, was detestable to him. He was

often described as a pure aesthete and a believer in art for art's sake,

and was accused of escapism and lack of civic sense, then, as now,

regarded in the view of a section of Russian opinion as being a despicable form of irresponsible self-indulgence. Yet these descriptions do not fit him. His writing was not as deeply and passionately committed

as that of Dostoevsky after his Siberian exile, or of the later Tolstoy,

but it was sufficiently concerned with social analysis to enable both

the revolutionaries and their critics, especially the liberals among them,

to draw ammunition from his novels. The Emperor Alexander II,

who had once admired Turgenev's early work, ended by looking upon

him as his hlte noire.

In this respect Turgenev was typical of his time and his class. More

sensitive and scrupulous, less obsessed and intolerant than the great

tormented moralists of his age, he reacted just as bitterly against the

horrors of the Russian autocracy. In a huge and backward country,

where the number of educated persons was very small and was divided

by a gulf from the vast majority of their fellow-men-they could

scarcely be described as citizens-living in conditions of unspeakable

poverty, oppression and ignorance, a major crisis of public conscience

was bound sooner or later to arise. The facts are familiar enough: the

Napoleonic wars precipitated Russia into Europe, and thereby, inevitably, into a more direct contact with western enlightenment than had previously been permitted. Army officers drawn from the land-1 Quoted from V. G. Korolenko's anicle '1. A. Goncharov i "molodoe

pokolenie" ', Polnoe so6ronie sochinenii (Petrograd, 191+), vol. 9• p. 3Z+;

see Targtntfl r1 nmloi lritilt (Moscow, 1 953), p. s:z7.

2.64

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

owning elite were brought into a degree of companionship with their

men, lifted as they all were by a common wave of vast patriotic

emotion. This for the moment broke through the rigid stratification

of Russian society. The salient features of this society included a semiliterate, state-dominated, largely corrupt Church; a small, incompletely westernised, ill-trained bureaucracy struggling to keep under and hold

back an enormous, primitive, half-medieval, socially and economically

undeveloped, but vigorous and potentially undisciplined, population

straining against its shackles; a widespread sense of inferiority, both

social and intellectual, before western civilisation; a society distorted

by arbitrary bullying from above and nauseating conformity and

obsequiousness from below, in which men with any degree of independence or originality or character found scarcely any outlet for normal development.

This is enough, perhaps, to account for the genesis, in the first half

of the century, of what came to be known as the 'superfluous person',

the hero of the new literature of protest, a member of the tiny minority

of educated and morally sensitive men, who is unable to find a place

in his native land and, driven in upon himself, is liable to escape either

into fantasies and illusions, or into cynicism or despair, ending, more

often than not, in self-destruction or surrender. Acute shame or furious

indignation caused by the misery and degradation of a system in which

human beings-serfs-were viewed as 'baptised property', together with

a sense of impotence before the rule of injustice, stupidity and corruption, tended to drive pent-up imagination and moral feeling into the only channels that the censorship had not completely shut off-literature

and the. arts. Hence the notorious fact that in Russia social and political

thinkers turned into poets and novelists, while creative writers often

became publicists. Any protest against institutions, no matter what its

origin or purpose, under an absolute despotism is to ipso a political act.

Consequently literature became the battleground on which the central

social and political issues of life were fought out. Literary or aesthetic

questions which in their birthplace-in Germany or France-were confined to academic or artistic coteries, became personal and social problems that obsessed an entire generation of educated young Russians

not primarily interested in literature or the arts as such. So, for

example, the controversy between the supporters of the theory of pure

art and those who believed that it had a social function-a dispute that

preoccupied a relatively small section of French critical opinion during

the July Monarchy-in Russia grew into a major moral and political

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2.65

R U S S IAN T H INKERS

issue, of progress against reaction, enlightenment versus obscurantism,

moral decency, social responsibility, and human feeling against aut�

cracy, piety, tradition, conformity, and obedience to established

authority.

The most passionate and influential voice ofhis generation was that

of the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. Poor, consumptive, ill-born,

ill-educated, a man of incorruptible sincerity and great strength of

character, he became the Savonarola of his generation-a burning

moralist who preached the unity of theory and practice, of literature

and life. His genius as a critic and his instinctive insight into the heart

of the social and moral problems that troubled the new radical youth

made him its natural leader. His literary essays were to him and to his

readers an unbroken, agonising, unswerving attempt to find the truth

about the ends of life, what to believe and what to do. A man of

passionate and undivided personality, Belinsky went through violent

changes of position, but never without having lived painfully through

each of his convictions and having acted upon them with the whole

force of his ardent and uncalculating nature until they failed him, one

by one, and forced him, again and again, to make a new beginning, a

task ended only by his early death. Literature was for him not a

mltitr, nor a profession, but the artistic expression of an all-embracing

outlook, an ethical and metaphysical doctrine, a view of history and

of man's place in the cosmos, a vision that embraced all facts and all

values. Belinsky was, first and foremost, a seeker after justice and

truth, and it was as much by the example of his profoundly moving

life and character as by his precepts that he bound his spell upon the

young radicals. Turgenev, whose early efforts as a poet he encouraged,

became his devoted and life-long admirer. The image of Belinsky,

particularly after his death, became the very embodiment of the committed man of letters; after him no Russian writer was wholly free from the belief that to write was, first and foremost, to bear witness

to the truth : that the writer, of all men, had no right to avert his

gaze from the central issues of his day and his society. For an artistand particularly a writer-to try to detach himself from the deepest concerns of his nation in order to devote himself to the creation of

beautiful objects or the pursuit of personal ends was condemned as

self-destructive egoism and frivolity; he would only be maimed and

impoverished by such betrayal of his chosen calling.

The tormented honesty and integrity of Belinsky's judgements-the

tone, even more than the content-penetrated the moral consciousness

1.66

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

of his Russian contemporaries, sometimes to be rejected, but never to

be forgotten. Turgenev was by nature cautious, judicious, frightened

of all extremes, liable at critical moments to take evasive action; his

friend, the poet Yakov Polonsky, many years later described him to a

reactionary minister as being 'kind and soft as wax . . . feminine . . .

without character'.1 Even if this goes too far, it is true that he was

highly impressionable and liable to yield to stronger personalities all

his life. Belinsky died in I 848, but his invisible presence seemed to

haunt Turgenev for the rest of his life. Whenever from weakness, or

love of ease, or craving for a quiet life, or sheer amiability of character,

Turgenev felt tempted to abandon the struggle for individual liberty

or common decency and to come to terms with the enemy, it may well

have been the stern and moving image of Belinsky that, like an icon,

at all times stood in his way and called him back to the sacred task.

The Sportsman's Sketches was his first and most lasting tribute to his

dying friend and mentor. To its readers this masterpiece seemed, and

seems still, a marvellous description of the old and changing rural

Russia, of the life of nature and of the lives of peasants, transformed

into a pure vision of art. But Turgenev looked on it as his first great

assault on the hated institution of serfdom, a cry of indignation

designed to burn itself into the consciousness of the ruling class. When,

in I 879, he was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws by the University

of Oxford in this very place,• James Bryce, who presented him,

described him as a champion of freedom. This delighted him.

Belinsky was neither the first nor the last to exercise a dominating

inftuence on Turgenev's life; the first, and perhaps the most destructive, was his widowed mother, a strong-willed, hysterical, brutal, bitterly frustrated woman who loved her son, and broke his spirit.

She was a savage monster even by the none too exacting standards of

humanity of the Russian landowners of those days. As a child Turgenev

had witnessed abominable cruelties and humiliations which she inflicted

upon her serfs and dependants; an episode in his story The Brigadier

is apparently founded on his maternal grandmother's murder of one

of her boy serfs: she struck him in a fit of rage; he fell wounded on

the ground; irritated by the spectacle she smothered him with a

1 See S!Jornilt PusA!tit�sltogo doffla 110 I923 god (Petrograd, 19z:z), pp.

288-9 (letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev, r 88r).

• The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in which a shortened version of this

lecture was delivered on 1 2 November 1970.

R U S S IAN T H INKERS

pillow •1 Memories of this kind fill his stories, and it took him his

entire life to work them out of his system.

It was early experience of scenes of this kind on the pan of men

brought up at school and university to respect the values of western

civilisation that was largely responsible for the lasting preoccupation

with the freedom and dignity of the individual, and for the hatred of

the relics of Russian feudalism, that characterised the political position

of the entire Ruv.ian intelligentsia from its beginnings. The moral

confusion was very great. 'Our time longs for convictions, it is tormented by hunger for the truth,' wrote Bdinsky in 1 8.p, when Turgenev was twenty-four and had become intimate with him, 'our

age is all questioning, questing, searching, nostalgic longing for the

truth . . . '1 Thirteen years later Turgenev echoed this: 'There are

epochs when literature cannot mertly be artistic, there are interests

higher than poetry.'1 Three years later Tolstoy, then dedicated to the

ideal of pure an, suggested to him the publication of a purely literary

and artistic periodical divorced from the squalid political polemics of

the day. Turgenev replied that it was not 'lyrical twittering' that the

times were calling for, nor 'birds singing on boughs';t 'you loathe this

political morass; true, it is a dirty, dusty, vulgar business. But there is

dirt and dust in the streets, and yet we cannot, after all, do without

towns.'5

The conventional picture of Turgenev as a pure artist drawn into

political strife against his will but remaining fundamentally alien to

it, drawn by critics both on the right and on the left (particularly by

those whom his political novels irritated), is misleading. His major

1 Ludwig Pietsch describes this incident aa related to him by Turgenev.

See JnostrtltJtJtlJtl lritilta o TurgtntrJt (St Petenburg, 1 884), p. 147. Pietsch is

quoted by E. A. Soloviev (l.S. TurgttrtrJ. Ego zlliu' i littrfllllr"11tlJtl dtytlttl'nost'

(Kazan, 19zz), pp. 39-40), who in tum is quoted by J. Mourier. This latter,

apparently misreading Soloviev, has it that the woman in question was

Turgenev's mother. J. Mourier, lr�an Strgulilr�itcll Tourgulntff a Spaulol

(St Petersburg, 1 899), p. z8.

• 'Rech' o kritike', Polnoe so6ranit socllintnii, vol. 6 (Moscow, 195 5),

pp. z67, z69.

1 Letter to V asily Botkin, z9 June 1 8 5 5. I. S. Turgenev, Polnot so6rt�nit

l«hitJtJiii i pistm (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960-68), Pis'mt�, vol. z, p. z8z. All

references to Turgenev's letten are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

t Letter to L. N. Tolstoy, z9 January 1 8 58.

a To Tolstoy, 8 April 18s8.

268

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

novels, from the middle iSsos onwards, are deeply concerned with the

central social and political questions that troubled the liberals of his

generation. His outlook was profoundly and pennanently influenced

by Belinsky's indignant humanism and in particular by his furious

philippics against all that was dark, corrupt, oppressive, false.1 Two

or three years earlier, at the University of Berlin, he had listened to

the Hegelian sermons of the future anarchist agitator Bakunin, who

was his fellow student, sat at the feet of the same Gennan philosophical

master and, as Belinsky had once done, admired Bakunin's dialectical

brilliance. Five years later he met in Moscow and soon became intimate

with the radical young publicist Herzen and his friends. He shared

their hatred of every form of enslavement, injustice and brutality, but

unlike some among them he could not rest comfortably in any doctrine

or ideological system. All that was general, abstract, absolute, repelled

him: his vision remained delicate, sharp, concrete, and incurably

realistic. Hegelianism, right-wing and left-wing, which he had imbibed

as a student in Berlin, materialism, socialism, positivism, about which

his friends ceaselessly argued, populism, collectivism, the Russian

village commune idealised by those Russian socialists whom the

ignominious collapse of the left in Europe in 1 848 had bitterly

disappointed and disillusioned-these came to seem mere abstractions

to him, substitutes for reality, in which many believed, and a few

even tried to live, doctrines which life, with its uneven surface and

irregular shapes of real human character and activity, would surely

resist and shatter if ever a serious effort were made to translate them

into practice. Bakunin was a dear friend and a delightful boon companion, but his fantasies, whether Slavophil or anarchist, left no trace on Turgenev's thought. Herzen was a different matter: he was a

sharp, ironical, imaginative thinker, and in their early years they had

much in common. Yet Herzen's populist socialism seemed to Turgenev

a pathetic fantasy, the dream of a man whose earlier illusions were

killed by the failure of the revolution in the west, but who could

1 'Doubb tormented (Belinsky], robbed him of sleep, food, relendessly

gnawed at him, burnt him, he would not let himself sink into forgetfulness,

did not know fatigue . . • his sincerity affected me too,' he wrote in his

reminiscences with characteristic self-deprecating irony and affection, 'his

fire communicated itself to me, the importance of the topic absorbed me; but

after talking for two to three hours I used to weaken, the frivolity of youth

would take its toll, I wanted to rest, I began to think of a walk, of dinner • • . '

Lilmzlurnyt i zhiuisl.it oospomiflt�fliya (Leningrad, 1934), p. 79·

•'

:169

R U S S I AN T H INKERS

not live long without faith; with his old ideals, social justice, equalitr,

liberal democracy, impotent before the forces of reaction in the west,

he must find himself a new idol to worship: against 'the golden calf'

(to use Turgenev's words) of acquisitive capitalism, he set up 'the

sheepskin coat' of the Russian peasant.

Turgenev understood and sympathised with his friend's cultural

despair. Like Carlyle and Flaubert, like Stendhal and Nietzsche, Ibsen

and Wagner, Herzen felt increasingly asphyxiated in a world in which

all values had become debased. All that was free and dignified and

independent and creative seemed to Herzen to have gone under beneath

the wave of bourgeois philistinism, the commercialisation of life by

corrupt and vulgar dealers in human commodities and their mean and

insolent lackeys who served the huge joint-stock companies called

France, England, Germany; even Italy (he wrote), 'the most poetical

country in Europe', when the 'fat, bespectacled little bourgeois of

genius', Cavour, offered to keep her, could ·not restrain herself and,

deserting both her fanatical lover Mazzini and her Herculean husband

Garibaldi, gave herself to him.1 Was it to this decaying corpse that

Russia was to look as the ideal model? The time was surely ripe for

some cataclysmic transformation- a barbarian invasion from the east

which would clear the air like a healing storm. Against this, Herzen

declared, there was only one lightning conductor-the Russian peasant

commune, free from the taint of capitalism, from the greed and fear

and inhumanity of destructive individualism. Upon this foundation a

new society of free, self-governing human beings might yet be built.

Turgenev regarded all this as a violent exaggeration, the dramatisation of private despair. Of course the Germans were pompous and ridiculous; Louis Napoleon and the profiteers of Paris were odious,

but the civilisation of the west was not crumbling. It was the greatest

achievement of mankind. It was not for Russians, who had nothing

comparable to offer, to mock at it or keep it from their gates. He accused

Herz.en of being a tired and disillusioned man, who after 1 849 was

looking for a new divinity and had found it in the simple Russi.m

peasant. 2 'You erect an altar to this new and unknown God because

almost nothing is known about him, and one can . . . pray and believe

1 A. I. Herzen, 'Kontsy i nachala', First Letter, I 862. Solmmit sochifltflii

'l1 tridtsati tolflallh (Moscow, 19 54-65), vol. 1 6, p. 1 3 8. Later references to

Herzen's works ai:e to this edition.

1 Letter to Herzen, 8 November 1 86z.

FATH ERS AND C H I LDREN

and wait. This God does not begin to do what you expect of him;

this, you say, is temporary, accidental, injected by outside forces; your

God loves and adores that which you hate, hates that which you love;

(he J accepts precisely what you reject on his behalf: you avert your

eyes, you stop your ears . . .'1 'Either you must serve the revolution,

and European ideals as before. Or, if you now think that there is

nothing in all this, you must have the courage to look the devil in

both eyes, plead guilty to the whole of Europe-to its face-and not make

an open or implied exception for some coming Russian Messiah' - least

of all for the Russian peasant who is, in embryo, the worst conservative

of all, and cares nothing for liberal ideas.1 Turgenev's sober realism

never deserted him. He resporided to the faintest tremors of Russian

life; in particular, to the changes of expression on what he called 'the

swiftly altering physiognomy of those who belong to the cultured

section of Russian society'.8 He claimed to do no more than to record

what Shakespeare called the 'form and pressure' of the time. He faithfully described them all-the talkers, the idealists, the fighters, the cowards, the reactionaries, and the radicals-sometimes, as in Smoke,

with biting polemical irony, but, as a rule, so scrupulously, with so

much understanding for all the overlapping sides of every question,

so much unruffled patience, touched only occasionally with undisguised

irony or satire (without sparing his own character and views), that he

angered almost everyone at some time.

Those who still think of him as an uncommitted artist, raised high

above the ideological battle, may be surprised to learn that no one in

the entire history of Russian literature, perhaps of literature in general,

has been so ferociously and continuously attacked, both from the

right and from the left, as Turgenev. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy held

far more violent views, but they were formidable figures, angry

prophets treated with nervous respect even by their bitterest opponents.

Turgenev was not in the least formidable; he was amiable, sceptical,

'kind and soft as wax',� too courteous and too self-distrustful to frighten

anyone. He embodied no clear principles, advocated no doctrine, no

1 ibid. On this topic see Pis'ma K. D. KilfJe/i1111 i I. S. TMrge11�11 l A. /.

Gn-tst11M, ed. M. Dragomanov (Geneva. 1 89: ),)etten byTurgenev for r 86z-J.

• Letter to Herzen, 8 November r 86:.

1 Introduction to the collected novels, r88o, Pol11ot so6ra11ie socAitu11ii i

pise111 (Moscow/Leningrad, 196o-68), 8ocAi11e11iya, vol. r :, p. 303. later

references to Turgenev'a works are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

' See above, p. :67, note 1.

R U SSIAN T H IN K E R S

panacea for the 'accursed questions', as they arne to be called, personal

and social. 'He felt and understood the opposite sides of life,' said

Henry James of him, 'our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, moralistic conventional standards were far away from him . . . half the charm of conversation with him was that one breathed an air in which cant

phrases . . • simply sounded ridiculous.'1 In a country in which readers,

and especially the young, to this day look to writers for moral direction,

he refused to preach. He was aware of the price he would have to pay

for such reticence. He knew that the Russian reader wanted to . be

told what to believe and how to live, expected to be provided with

clearly contrasted values, clearly distinguishable heroes and villains.

When the author did not provide this, Turgenev wrote, the reader

was dissatisfied and blamed the writer, since he found it difficult and

irritating to have to make up his own mind, find his own way. And,

indeed, it is true that Tolstoy never leaves you in doubt about whom

he favours and whom he condemns; Dostoevsky does not conceal

what he regards as the path of salvation. Among these great, tormented

LaocoOns Turgenev remained cautious and sceptical; the reader is left

in suspense, in a state of doubt: central problems are raised, and for the

most part left-it seemed to some a trifle complacently-unanswered.

No society demanded more of its authors than Russia, then or now.

T urgenev was accused of vacillation, temporising, infirmity of purpose,

of speaking with too many voices. Indeed, this very topic obsessed

him. Rudin, Asya, On the Eve, the major works of the 1 Ssos, are

preoccupied with weakness-the failure of men of generous heart,

sincerely held ideals, who remain impotent and give in without a

struggle to the forces of stagnation. Rudin, drawn partly from the

young Bakunin, partly from himself,1 is a man of high ideals, talks

well, fascinates his listeners, expresses views which Turgenev could

accept and defend. But he is made of paper. When he is faced with a

genuine crisis which calls for courage and resolution, he crumples and

collapses. His friend, Lezhnev, defends Rudin's memory: his ideals

were noble but he had 'no blood, no character'. In the epilogue (which

the author added as an afterthought to a later edition), after aimless

l Partial Portraill (London, ! 888), pp. z96-7. For James's view of

Turgenev see also Tltt .1rt of Fiction (Oxford, 1948).

1 His critical friend Herz:en said that Turgenev created Rudin 'in biblical

fashion-after his own image and likeness'. 'Rudin', he added, 'is Turgenev

the Second, plus (t�oslr11luwslziisya) a lot of . . . Bakunin's philosophical

jargon.' So6ra11it roclzifll!flii, vol. I I, p. 3 59·

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

wanderings, Rudin dies bravely but uselessly on the barricades of

Paris in 1 848, something of which his prototype Bakunin was, in

Turgenev's view, scarcely capable. But even this was not open to him

in his native land; even if Rudin had blood and character, what could

he have done in the Russian society of his time? This 'superfluous'

man, the ancestor of all the sympathetic, futile, ineffective talkers in

Russian literature, should he, couid he, in the circumstances of his

time have declared war upon the odious aristocratic lady and her world

to which he capitulates? The reader is left without guidance. The

heroine of On the Eve, Elena, who looks for a heroic personality to

help her escape from the false existence of her parents and their milieu,

finds that even the best and most gifted Russians in her circle lack willpower, cannot act. She follows the fearless Bulgarian conspirator Insarov, who is thinner, drier, less civilised, more wooden than the

sculptor Shubin or the historian Bersenev, but, unlike them, is possessed by a single thought-to liberate his country from the Turk, a simple dominant purpose that unites him with the last peasant and the

last beggar in his land. Elena goes with him because he alone, in her

world, is whole and unbroken, because his ideals are backed by

indomitable moral strength.

Turgenev published On the Eve in the CDntnnpDrary (Sovremmnik),

a radical journal then moving steadily and rapidly to the left. The

group of men who dominated it were as uncongenial to him as they

were to Tolstoy; he thought them dull, narrow doctrinaires, devoid of

all understanding of art, enemies of beauty, uninterested in personal

relationships (which were everything to him), but they were bold

and strong, fanatics who judged everything in the light of a single

goal-the liberation of the Russian people. They rejected compromise:

they were bent on a radical solution. The emancipation of the serfs,

which moved Turgenev and all his liberal friends profoundly, was to

these men not the beginning of a new era, but a miserable fraud : the

peasants were still chained to their landlords by the new economic

arrangements. Only the 'peasant's axe', a mass rising of the people

in arms, would give it freedom. Dobrolyubov, the literary editor of

the magazine, in his review of On the Eve, acclaimed the Bulgarian

as a positive hero: for he was ready to give his life to drive out the

Turk from his country. And we? We Russians, too (he declared),

have our Turks-only they are internal: the court, the gentry, the

generals, the ofli.cials, the rising bourgeoisie, oppressors and exploiters

whose weapons are the ignorance of the masses and brute force. Where

,,

:173

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

are our lnsarovs? Turgenev speaks of an eve; when will the real day

dawn? If it has not dawned yet, this is because the good, the enlightened

young men, the Shubins and Bersenevs in Turgenev's novel, are

impotent. They are paralysed, and will, for all their fine words, end

by adapting themselves to the conventions of the philistine life of their

society, because they are too closely connected with the prevailing

order by a network of family and institutional and economic relationships which they cannot bring themselves to break entirely. 'If you sit in an empty box', said Dobrolyubov, in the final version of his

article, 'and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort

you have to make ! But if you come at it from outside, one push will

topple this box.'1 Insarov stood outside his box-the box is the Turkish

invader. Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box,

break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and

then knock it over from outside. Herzen and Ogarev sit in London

and waste their time in exposing isolated cases of injustice, corruption

or mismanagement in the Russian Empire; but this, so far from

weakening that empire, may even help it to eliminate such shortcomings and last longer. The real task is to destroy the whole inhuman system. Dobrolyubov's advice is clear: those who are serious must

endeavour to abandon the box-remove themselves from all contact

with the Russian state as it is at present, for there is no other means

to acquire an Archimedean point, leverage for causing it to collapse.

lnsarov rightly lets private revenge-the execution of those who

tortured and killed his parents-wait until the larger task is accomplished. There must be no waste of energy on piecemeal denunciations, on the rescue of individuals from cruelty or injustice. This is mere liberal fiddling, escape from the radical task. There is nothing

common between 'us' and 'them'. 'They', and Turgenev with them,

seek reform, accommodation.'We' want destruction, revolution, new

foundations of life; nothing else will destroy the reign of darkness.

This, for the radicals, is the clear implication of Turgenev's novel;

but he and his friends are evidently too craven to draw it.

Turgenev was upset and, indeed, frightened by this interpretation

of his book. He tried to get the review withdrawn. He said that if it

1 This sentence does not occur in the original review of r 86o, but wu

included in the posthumous edition of Dobrolyubov's essays two years later.

See 'Kogda zhe pridet nastoyashchii den'l' 8o6rtJ•it sotll;.,,;;, vol. 6

(Moscow, 1963), p. r :z6.

274

FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

appeared he would not know what to do or where to run. Nevertheless

he was fascinated by these new men. He loathed the gloomy puritanism

of these 'Daniels of the Neva', as they were called by Herzen,l who

thought them cynical and brutal and could not bear their crude antiaesthetic utilitarianism, their fanatical rejection of all that he held dear-liberal culture, art, civilised human relationships. But they were

young, brave, ready to die in the fight against the common enemy,

the reactionaries, the police, the state. Turgenev wished, in spite of

everything, to be liked and respected by them. He tried to flirt with

Dobrolyubov, and constantly engaged him in conversation. One day,

when they met in the offices of the Contemporary, Dobrolyubov

suddenly said to him, 'Ivan Sergeevich, do not let us go on talking to

each other: it bores me,'1 and walked away to a distant corner of the

room. Turgenev did not give up immediately. He was a celebrated

charmer; he did his best to find a way to woo the grim young man.

It was of no use; when he saw Turgenev approach he stared at the

wall or pointedly left the room. 'You can talk to Turgenev if you

like,' Dobrolyubov said to his fellow editor Chernyshevsky, who at

this time still looked with favour and admiration on Turgenev, and

he added, characteristically, that in his view bad allies were no allies.•

This is worthy of Lenin; Dobrolyubov had, perhaps, the most

Bolshevik temperament of all the early radicals. Turgenev in the

t Ssos and early 6os was the most famous writer in Russia, the only

Russian writer with a great and growing European reputation. Nobody

had ever treated him like this. He was deeply wounded. Nevertheless,

he persisted for a while, but in the end, faced with Dobrolyubov's

implacable hostility, gave up. There was an open breach. He crossed

over to the conservative review edited by Mikhail Katkov, a man

regarded by the left wing as their deadliest enemy.

In the meanwhile the political atmosphere grew more stormy. The

terrorist Land and Liberty League was created in 1 86 1 , the very year

of the great emancipation. Violently worded manifestos calling on the

peasants to revolt began to circulate. The radical leaders were charged

1 A. I. Herzen, So6r11nit socAinenii, vol. 14, p. 322.

I N. G. Chemyshevaky's reminiscences quoted in /. 8. TurgtfltrJ Cl e�ospominllniylllA JOCirtmtnflilw (Moscow, 196o), vol. I, p. 356. This story was recorded by Chemyshevaky in J884, many years after the event, at the

request of his cousin Pypin, who was collecting material about the radical

movement of the 6os; there is no reason for doubting its accuracy.

I ibid., p. ] 5 8.

275

R U SSIAN THINKERS

with conspiracy, were imprisoned or exiled. Fires broke out in the

capital and university students were accused of starting them; Turgenev did not come to their defence. The booing and whistling of the radicals, their brutal mockery, seemed to him mere vandalism; their

revolutionary aims, dangerous Utopianism. Yet he felt that something

new was rising-a vast social mutation of some kind. He declared that

he felt it everywhere. He was repelled and at the same time fascinated

by it. A new and formidable type of adversary of the regime-and of

much that he and his generation of liberals believed in-was coming

into e�istence. Turgenev's curiosity was always stronger than his fears:

he wanted, above everything, to understand the new Jacobins. These

men were crude, fanatical, hostile, insulting, but they were undemoralised, self-confident, and, in some narrow but genuine sense, rational and disinterested. He could not bear to tum his back upon

them. They seemed to him a new, clear-eyed generation, undeluded

by the old romantic myths; above all they were the young, the future

of his country lay in their hands; he did not wish to be cut off from

anything that seemed to him alive, passionate, and disturbing. After

all, the evils that they wished to fight were evils; their enemies were,

to some degree, his enemies too; these young men were wrongheaded, barbarous, contemptuous ofliberals like himself, but they were fighters and martyrs in the battle against despotism. He was intrigued,

horrified and dazzled by them. During the whole of the rest of his

life he was obsessed by a desire to explain them to himself, and perhaps

himself to them.

1 1

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: 'You had content

but no force.' Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: 'And

you have force but no content.'

From a contemporary conversationl

This is the topic pf Turgenev's most famous, and politically most

interesting, novel Fathtrs and Childrm. It was an attempt to give

Aesh and substance to his image of the new men, whose mysterious,

implacable presence, he declared, he felt about him everywhere, and

who inspired in him feelings that he found difficult to analyse. 'There

1 The original epigraph to F athrs 1111d Childrtll, which Turgenev later

discarded. See A. Mazon, Mallf�J(rits pllrisit11s d'/rJafl TrmrguiMrJ (Paris,

1930), PP· 6+-S·

FATHERS AND CHILDREN

was', he wrote many years later to a friend, '-please don't laugh-some

sort of fatum, something stronger than the author himself, something

independent of him. I know one thing: I started with no preconceived

idea, no "tendency"; I wrote naively, as if myself astonished at what

was emerging.'1 He said that the central figure of the novel, Bazarov,

was mainly modelled on a Russian doctor whom he met in a train in

Russia. But Bazarov has some of the characteristics of Belinsky too.

Like him, he is the son of a poor army doctor, and he possesses some

of Belinsky's brusqueness, his directness, his intolerance, his liability

to explode at any sign of hypocrisy, of solemnity, of pompous conservative, or evasive liberal, cant. And there is, despite Turgenev's denials, something of the ferocious, militant, anti-aestheticism of

Dobrolyubov too. The central topic of the novel is the confrontation

of the old and young, of liberals and radicals, traditional civilisation

and the new, hanh positivism which has no use for anything except

what is needed by a rational man. Bazarov, a young medical researcher,

is invited by his fellow student and disciple, Arkady Kinanov, to stay

at his father's house in the country. Nikolay Kinanov, the father, is a

gentle, kindly, modest country gentleman, who adores poetry and

nature, and greets his son's brilliant friend with touching courtesy.

Also in the house is Nikolay Kinanov's brother, Pavel, a retired army

officer, a carefully dressed, vain, pompous, old-fashioned dandy, who

had once been a minor lion in the solons of the capital, and is now

living out his life in elegant and irritated boredom. Bazarov scents

an enemy, and takes deliberate pleasure in describing himself and his

allies as 'nihilists', by which he means no more than that he, and those

who think like him, reject everything that cannot be established by

the rational methods of natural science. Truth alone matten: what

cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or

harmful ballast-'romantic rubbish'-which an intelligent man will

ruthlessly eliminate. In this heapofirrational nonsense Bazarov includes

all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement-literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised

assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, of

landownen and serfs. He believes in strength, will-power, energy,

utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear

off masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable

t From a letter to M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

R U S S IAN THINKERS

facts, only useful knowledge, matter. He clashes almost immediatdy

with the touchy, conventional Pavel Kirsanov: 'At present', he tells

him, 'the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny.' 'Everything�'

asks Pavel Kirsanov. 'Everything.' 'What� Not only art, poetry . . . but

even . . . too horrible to utter . . .' 'Everything.' 'So you destroy every-

thing . . . but surely one must build, too?' 'That's not our business • . .

First one must clear the ground.'

The fiery revolutionary agitator Bakunin, who had just then

esaped from Siberia to London, was saying something of this kind :

the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the

ground, before something new can be built upon it; what this is to be

is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries, our business is to demolish.

The new men, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and

exploiters, and its bogus values-these men will know what to do. The

French anarchist Georges Sorel once quoted Marx as saying 'Anyone

who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.'1

This went beyond the position of Turgenev's radical critics of the

Contemporary: they did have a programme of sorts: they were democratic populists. But faith in the people seems just as irrational to Bazarov as the rest of the 'romantic rubbish'. 'Our peasants', he declares, 'are prepared to rob themselves in order to drink themselves blind at the inn.' A man's first duty is to develop his own powers, to be

strong and rational, to create a society in which other rational men

can breathe and live and learn. His mild disciple Arkady suggests to

him that it would be ideal if all peasants lived in a pleasant whitewashed hut, like the head man of their village. 'I have conceived a loathing for this . . . peasant,' Bazarov says, 'I have to work the skin

off my hands for him, and he won't so much as thank me for it;

anyway, what do I need his thanks for? He'll go on living in his

whitewashed hut, while weeds grow out of me . . . ' Arkady is shocked

by such talk; but it is the voice of the new, hard-boiled, unashamed

materialistic egoism. Nevertheless Bazarov is at his ease with peasants;

they are not self-conscious with him even if they think him an odd

sort of member of the gentry. Bazarov spends his afternoon in dissecting

frogs. 'A decent chemist', he tells his shaken host, 'is twenty times

1 Sorel declares that this passage occurs in a letter which, according

to the economist Lujo Brentano, Marx wrote to one of his English friends,

Professor Beesly (RijltxifJns sur Ia rJiolttut, 7th ed. [Paris, 1 930 ], p. 199,

note z). I have not found it in any published collection of Marx's letters.

278

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

more use than any poet.' Arkady, after consulting Bazarov, gently

draws a volume of Pushkin out of his father's hands, and slips into

them BUchner's Kraft und Stoff',! the latest popular exposition of

materialism. Turgenev describes the older Kirsanov walking in his

garden: 'Nikolay Petrovich dropped his head, and passed his hand over

his face. "But to reject poetry," he thought again, "not to have a

feeling for art, for nature . . • " and he cast about him, as if trying to

understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature.' All

principles, Bazarov declares, are reducible to mere sensations. Arkady

asks whether, in that case, honesty is only a sensation. 'You find this

hard to swallowl' says Bazarov. 'No, friend, if you have decided to

knock everything down, you must knock yourself down, too! • . . '

This is the voice of Bakunin and Dobrolyubov : 'one must clear the

ground'. The new culture must be founded on real, that is materialist,

scientific values: socialism is just as unreal and abstract as any other

of the 'isms' imported from abroad. As.for the old aesthetic, literary

culture, it will crumble before the realists, the new, tough-minded

men who can look the brutal truth in the face. 'Aristocracy, liberalism,

progress, principles . . . what a lot of foreign . . . and useless words. A

Russian would not want them as a gift.' Paul Kirsanov rejects this

contemptuously; but his nephew Arkady cannot, in the end, accept it

either. 'You aren't made for our harsh, bitter, solitary kind of life,'

Bazarov tells him, 'you aren't insolent, you aren't nasty, all you have

is the audacity, the impulsiveness of youth, and that is of no use in

our business. Your type, the gentry, cannot get beyond noble humility,

noble indignation, and that is nonsense. You won't, for instance, fight,

and yet you think yourselves terrific. We want to fight . . . Our dust

will eat out your eyes, our dirt will spoil your clothes, you haven't

risen to our level yet, you still can't help admiring yourselves, you

like castigating yourselves, and that bores us. Hand us others-it is

them we want to break. You are a good fellow, but, all the same, you

are nothing but a soft, beautifully bred, liberal boy . . . '

Bazarov, someone once said, is the first Bolshevik; even though he

is not a socialist, there is some truth in this. He wants radical change

and does not shrink from brute force. The old dandy, Pavel Kirsanov,

protests against this: 'Force? There is force in savage Kalmucks and

Mongols, too . . . What do we want it for? . . . Civilisation, its fruits,

are dear to us. And don't tell me they are worthless. The most

1 Turgenev calls it Stoff t111J Krtlft.

,,

279

R U S S IAN T H I N K ERS

miserable dauber . • . the pianist who taps on the keys in a restaurant

. . . they are more useful than you are, because they represent civilisation and not brute Mongol force. You imagine that you are progressive; you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon !' In the end, Bazarov,

against all his principles, falls in love with a cold, clever, well-born

society beauty, is rejected by her, suffers deeply, and not long after

dies as a result of an infection caught while dissecting a corpse in a

village autopsy. He dies stoically, wondering whether his country had

any real need of him and men like him; and his death is bitterly

lamented by his old, humble, loving parents. Bazarov falls because he

is broken by fate, not through failure of will or intellect. 'I conceived

him', Turgenev later wrote to a young student, 'as a sombre figure,

wild, huge, half-grown out of the soil, powerful, nasty, honest, but

doomed to destruction because he still stands only in the gateway to

the future • . .'1 This brutal, fanatical, dedicated figure, with his

unused powers, is represented as an avenger for insulted human

reason; yet, in the end, he is incurably wounded by a love, by a human

passion that he suppresses and denies within himself, a crisis by which

he is humiliated and humanised. In the end, he is crushed by heartless

nature, by what the author calls the cold-eyed goddess Isis, who does

not care for good or evil, or art or beauty, still less for man, the

creature of an hour; he is not saved either· by his egoism or his altruism,

by faith or works, by rational hedonism or puritanical pursuit of duty;

he struggles to assert himself; but nature is indifferent; she obeys her

own inexorable laws.

Fathers and Children was published in the spring of I 862 and caused

the greatest storm among its Russian readers of any novel before or,

indeed, since. What was Bazarov? How was he to be taken? Was he

a positive or a negative figure? A hero or a devil? He is young, bold,

intelligent, strong, he has thrown off the burden of the past, the

melancholy impotence of the 'superfluous men' beating vainly against

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

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

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.

288

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}.

••

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·)

·'

291

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,

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.

:l-9:1

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.

:l-94

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).

..

295

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.

296

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and traitors. The radicals look on them as pusillanimous allies, more

often as diversionists and renegades.

Men of this sort need a good deal of courage to resist magnetisation

by either polar force and to urge moderation in a disturbed situation.

Among them are those who see, and cannot help seeing, many sides

of a case, as well as those who perceive that a humane cause promoted

by means that are too ruthless is in danger of turning into its opposite,

liberty into oppression in the name of liberty, equality into a new,

self-perpetuating oligarchy to defend equality, justice into crushing of

all forms of nonconformity, love of men into hatred of those who

oppose brutal methods of achieving it. The middle ground is a

notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position. The complex

position of those who, in the thick of the fight, wish to continue to

speak to both sides is often interpreted as softness, trimming, opportunism, cowardice. Yet this description, which may apply to some men, was not true of Erasmus; it was not true of Montaigne; it was

not true of Spinoza, when he agreed to talk to the French invader of

Holland; it was not true of the best representatives of the Gironde,

or of some among the defeated liberals in 1 848, or of stout-hearted

members of the European left who did not side with the Paris Commune in 1 8 7 1 . It was not weakness or cowardice that prevented the Mensheviks from joining Lenin in 1 9 1 7, or the unhappy German

socialists from turning Communist in 1 932.

The ambivalence of such moderates, who are not prepared to break

their principles or betray the cause in which they believe, has become

a common feature of political life after the last war. This stems, in

part, from the historic position of nineteenth-century liberals for whom

the enemy had hitherto always been on the right-monarchists,

clericals, aristocratic supporters of political or economic oligarchies,

men whose rule promoted, or was indifferent to, poverty, ignorance,

injustice and the exploitation and degradation of men. The natural

inclination of liberals has been, and still is, towards the left, the party

of generosity and humanity, towards anything that destroys barriers

between men. Even after the inevitable split they tend to be deeply

reluctant to believe that there can be real enemies on the left. They

may feel morally outraged by the resort to brutal violence by some of

their allies; they protest that such methods will distort or destroy the

common goal. The Girondins were driven into this position in 1 792;

liberals like Heine or Lamartine in 1 848; Mazzini, and a good many

socialists, of whom Louis Blanc was the most representative, were

..

297

R U S SIAN T HI N K E R S

repelled by the methods of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 . These crises

passed. Breaches were healed. Ordinary politial warfare was

resumed. The hopes of the moderates began to revive. The desperate

dilemmas in which they found themselves could be viewed as being

due to moments of sudden aberration which could not last. But in

Russia, from the 1 86os until the revolution of 191 7, this uneasy

feeling, made more painful by periods of repression and horror, became

a chronic condition -a long, unceasing malaise of the entire enlightened

section of society. The dilemma of the liberals became insoluble, They

wished to destroy the regime which seemed to them wholly evil. They

believed in reason, secularism, the rights of the individual, freedom

of speech, of association, of opinion, the liberty of groups and races

and nations, greater social and economic equality, above all in the rule

of justice. They admired the selfless dedication, the purity of motive,

the martyrdom of those, no matter how extremist, who offered their

lives for the violent overthrow of the status quo. But they feared

that the losses entailed by terrorist or Jacobin methods might be

irreparable, and greater than any possible gains; they were horrified by the fanaticism and barbarism of the extreme left, by its contempt for the only culture that they knew, by its blind faith in what seemed to them Utopian fantasies, whether anarchist or populist or

.

Marxist.

These Russians believed in European civilisation as converts

believe in a newly acquired faith. They could not bring themselves

to contemplate, still less to sanction, the destruction of much that

seemed to them of infinite value for themselves and for all men in

the past, even the tsarist past. Caught between two armies, denounced

by both, they repeated their mild and rational words without much

genuine hope of being heard by either side. They remained obstinately

reformist and non-revolutionary. Many suffered from complex forms

of guilt: they sympathised more deeply with the goals upon their left;

but, spumed by the radials, they tended to question, like the selfcritial, open-minded human beings that they were, the validity of their own positions; they doubted, they wondered, they felt tempted,

from time to time, to jettison their enlightened principles and find

peace by conversion to a revolutionary faith, above all by submission

to the domination of the zealots. To stretch themselves upon a

comfortable bed of dogma would, after all, save them from being

plagued by their own uncertainties, from the terrible suspicion that

the simple solutions of the extreme left might, in the end, be as

7.98

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

irrational and as repressive as the nationalism, or elitism, or mysticism

of the right. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings the left still seemed

to them to stand for a more human faith than the frozen, bureaucratic,

heartless right, if only because it was always better to be with the

persecuted than with the persecutors. But there was one conviction

which they never abandoned : they knew that evil means destroyed

good ends. They knew that to extinguish existing liberties, civilised

habits, rational behaviour, to abolish them today, in the belief that,

like a phoenix, they would arise in a purer and more glorious form

tomorrow, was to fall into a terrible snare and delusion. Herzen told

his old friend, the anarchist Bakunin, in 1 869 that to order the intellect

to stop because its fruits might be misused by the enemy, to arrest

science, invention, the progress of reason, until men were made pure

by the fires of a total revolution-until 'we are free' -was nothing but

a self-destructive fallacy. 'One cannot stop intelligence', Herzen wrote

in his last and magnificent essay, 'because the majority lacks understanding, while the minority makes evil use of it . . . Wild cries to close books, abandon science, and go to some senseless battle of

destruction-that is the most violent and harmful kind of demagoguery.

It will be followed by the eruption of the most savage passions . • . No!

Great revolutions are not achieved by the unleashing of evil passions

.

I

. .

do not believe in the seriousness of men who prefer crude force

and destruction to development and arriving at settlements • • . '1 and

then, in an insufficiently remembered phrase, 'One must open men's

eyes, not tear them out. '1 Bakunin had declared that one must first

clear the ground: then we shall see. That savoured to Herzen of the

dark ages of barbarism. In this he spoke for his entire generation in

Russia. This is what Turgenev, too, felt and wrote during the last

twenty years of his life. He declared that he was a European; western

culture was the only culture that he knew; this was the banner under

which be had marched as a young man: it was his banner still.8_ His

spokesman is Potugin in Smoit, when he says 'I am devoted to

Europe, or to be more precise to • . . civilisation . . . this word is pure

and holy, while other words, "folk", for example, or . • • yes, or

"glory", smell of blood . . .' His condemnation of political mysticism

1 'K ataromu tovarishchu', Fourth Letter, 1 869, Bllllrfltlit 111'11;,,,;;, vol.

zo, PP· 59z-3.

I ibid., P· 593·

• Letter to Herzen of zs November 1 86z.

..

299

R U S S IAN T HINKERS

and irrationalism, populist and Slavophil, conservative or anarchist,

remained absolute.

But short of this, these 'men of the 40s' were less sure: to support

the left in its excesses went against the civilised grain; but to go against

it, or even to remain indifferent to its fate, to abandon it to the forces

of reaction, seemed even more unthinkable. The moderates hoped,

against all evidence, that the ferocious anti-intellectualism, which,

liberals in Russia told Turgenev, was spreading like an infectious

disease among the young, the contempt for painting, music, books,

the mounting political terrorism, . were passing excesses due to immaturity, lack of education; they were results of a long frustration; they would disappear once the pressures that had generated them

were removed. Consequently they explained away the violent language

and the violent acts of the extreme left, and continued to support the

uneasy alliance.

This painful conflict, which became the permanent predicament

of the Russian liberals for half a century, has now grown world-wide.

We must be clear: it is not the Baza.rovs who are the champions of

the rebellion today. In a sense, the Bazarovs have won. The victorious

advance of quantitative methods, belief in the organisation of human

lives by technological management, reliance on nothing but calculation

of utilitarian consequences in evaluating policies that affect vast

numbers of human beings, this is Bazarov, not the Kirsanovs. The

triumphs of the calm moral arithmetic of cost-effectiveness which

liberates decent men from qualms, because they no longer think of

th.! entities to which they apply their scientific computations as actual

human .beings who live the lives and suffer the deaths of concrete

individuals-this, today, is rather more typical of the establishment

than of the opposition. The suspicion of all that is qualitative, imprecise,

unanalysable, yet precious to men, and its relegation to Bazarov's

obsolete, intuitive, pre-scientific rubbish heap, has, by a strange

paradox, stirred both the anti-rationalist right and the irrationalist left

to an equally vehement opposition to the technocratic establishment

in the middle. From their opposed standpoints the extreme left and

the extreme right see such efforts to rationalise social life as a terrible

threat to what both sides regard as the deepest human values. If

Turgenev were living at this hour, the young radicals whom he

would wish to describe, and perhaps to please, are those who wish to

rescue men from the reign of those very. 'sophisters, economists, and

calculators' whose coming Burke lamented-those who ignore or

300

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·

JO I

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.

JO:I

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

..

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

this normal? Everything is abnormal in our society; that is how

these things happen, and, when they do, nobody knows how to actnot only in the most difficult situations, but even in the simplest. I might write about this. I could say a great deal that might be good

and bad both for society and for the Government; yet this cannot be

done. About the most important things we are not allowed to talk.'

He talked a great deal on this theme, and talked with inspired

feeling. He added that he would write a novel, the hero of which

would be Alesha Karamazov. He wanted to take him through a

monastery and make him a revolutionary; he would then commit a

political crime; he would be executed. He would search for the

truth, and in the course of this quest would naturally become a

revolutionary . . . 1

1 The editor of this text, which he calls a 'fragment', mentions a passage

in the novel in which Ivan Karamazov speaks to his saintly brother Alesha

about the case of the general who set his dogs to hound a peasant boy to

death before the eyes of his mother; he asks Alesha whether he would want

the general to be killed for this. Alesha, after a tormented silence, says that

he would. 'Bravo' says Ivan.

Index of Names

Compiled by Patricia Utech in

About, E., 161

Balzac, H. de, ZJ, 1 30, 141, 183, 2.86

�hylus, 74

Baratyoaky, E. A., 1 75, 183

Akhsharumov, D. D., 16, 16, 45• so

Baring, M., 162.

Aksaltov, I. S., 6, 1 8-19, 150

Barri:a, M., 79

Aluakov, K. S., 6, 1 8-19, 168

Bartenev, P. 1., 57

Akselrod, P. B., 133

Batyuto, A. I., z.86n, 2.87n

Albertus Magnus, J Z 7

Bayle, P., 1 37

d'Aiembert, J . le R., 7 2.

Baz.a.nov, V. G., z.hn, 2.87n

Alexander I , Emperor, J+• 38-9, 41, 63,

Beaumarchais, P. A. C. de, 39

67, 1 1 7

Beealy, E. S., 2.78n

Alexander II, Emperor, 4, 9-10, 181,

Beethoven, L. van, 1 58, 301

1 10, 1JJ, 2.51• 2.61, 2.64

Belinsky, V. G., xviii, xxi, xxiii, :r., 4o 6,

Annenkov, P. V., 9• 1 3, 15, 1 14, 1 16,

8-9, 12., 16, 1 8, :r.o, 2.5, 86, IOJ, 1 14-

IJJ-s, 145, ,5o, 152., 173, 119, ,9,,

1 16, 1 3.._ 148, 1 5o, 1s:r.-8s ptusi,,

2.83

1 89, 191• 193· 198, 100, uo, 2.2.4,

Annensky, I. F., 183

2.61-:r., 2.66-9, 2.77• :r.88, 194

d'Annunzio, G., 58

Benedi.ktov, V. G., 183

Antonovich, M. A., 18!, 2.83n

Benkendorf, Count A. Kh., 1 3

Apostolov, N. N., 30n

Bennett, A., :r.7n, 36

Aquinas, Thomas, St, 72.

Bentham, J., u8, 2.46

Arc!Uiochus, u

Bergson, H., 44

Aristophanes, 301

Biryukov, P. I., 15n, :r.6, 61n

Aristotle, 2.3, 2.57

Bismarck, 0. E. L., Prince von, 101,

Arkhipov, V. A., 183n, 186n

1 10

Arnold, M., 162.

Blake, W., 79

Attila, 101, 1 1 3, 199

Blanc, L., 8, B:r., 89, 96, 191, 193-4, 2.97

Augustine, St, 77

Blanqui, L. A., 1 7, 1 36

Blok, A. A., 13, 183

Babeuf, F. N. (Gracchus), 1 7, 96, 1oo,

Bogoslovsky, E. I., zsn

1 14, 2.11

Borisov, I. P., z88n

Bacon, F., 257

Botkin, V. P., 4-5, 15, :r.8, 1 34, 148,

Bakunin, M. A., xviii-xix, 1, S• 9-10,

154, 169, 1 7 1, 2.2.9, 168n

12., 1 7-20, 82-3, 10 1-3, IOS-I3, 1 1 6,

Boyer, P., 56

144-6, 1 54· 163, 167, 1 79-80, 197·

Brentano, L., 2.78n

1 99-2.00, 104- 109, 2. 14-15, 1 1 7, 2.11-

Bryce, J., 16'7

5• 169, 171-J, 178-9, 188, 191n, 2.99•

BOchner, F. K. C. L., 76, 179

JOI

Buckle, H. T., 43• S4

Balasoglo, A. P., 16-1 7

Bulgarin, F. V., 8, 1 1

Balmont, K. D., 183

Buonarotti, F . M., 2. 14, 114, 136

J06

I N D E X O F N A M E S

Burckhardt, J., 98, I JI, :&09

Daamy, T., 17

Burke, E., 45, 79o IU, JOO

DickeDs, c. I. H., ]O, Z4D· Z94f ]OZ

Buwbevich-Petn�benlty, ·,n

Didaot, D., 39o Sl• 70o 17z

Petraebenlty

Dmitriev, I. 1., tb

Butler, S., 12.7

Dobrolyubov, N. A., 19, tsz, u9,

ButurliD, D. P., 1 3

Z7J-S• Z77o Z79• Zll

Byaly, G . A., :l86n

Doetoenky, F. M., :Dii, lCI, S• 9· IS

Byron, G. G., Baron, aSs

II, ao, zz-4, sz, 54-o 6sn, 104-o 1 13,

Cahanis,

I I J, IZ9o 147, IJO, I J9• 17Z-], 180,

P. ]. G., 70

th-], 19]0 198, ZOJ, ZZZ, ZZJ, :t3],

Cabet, E., 7, 96, 12.4-o 191, 191, au

148, :t61n, Z6]-4t Z71-z, z89o 292-Jo

Carlyle, T., 79• 241, 270

JOZn, ]OJ-S

Catherine II, Empress ('tbe Great'), 30,

Dragomanov, M. P., 171n

1 17, 1 54

Dabelt, L. V., 7-l, u.n, 13

Cavour, Count C. B., :t70

Ducharel, C.-M.-T., 8

Chaadaev, P. Ya., Diii, 1, 7, 14-15, IS4

Duff, J. D., rl6

Chat.eauhriand, F. R., Vicomre de, 79

Durov, S. F., 17

Cbekhov, A. P., :t], IJZ, 301, JOJ

Chemov, N., 116n

Eprton, W., z86n

Cbemyabevsky, N. G., l• 6, 1 7, 19-zo,

Eikhenbaum, B. M., :1711, 48, SJn, 5711,

S4o 83, 101, IS:t, 178, 181, z14o u6-

6sn

1 7, ZZ4-J I, ZJ4o ZJ6, Z7So Zl]n

Eliot, George, zoa, JO:t

Cbenkov, V. G., JOn

Eaceb. F., I, , •• IQ9, ZJl-4-o 2.]6

Cbeltuton, G. K., 78

Erasmus, D., :t], ao1, 297

ChicberiD, B. N., 6

Evropeus, A. I., 16

Chopin, F. F., Z49o ZS4-S

Cicero, JO:t

Fet, A. A., as, a6n, 11, 143

Cobbett, W., 16, 78, 180, Z41

Feuerbacb, L. A., 1 1 1, 1z4o 145, 170

Coleridge, S. T., 79

Ficbte, J. G., 87, l:tl0 12.7, 1 36, 166,

Comre, A., S• JZ, S4• 140

ZZ4

CondiUac, E . .B. de, 137-l

Figner, Vera N., 133

Condoroet, M. J. A. N. C., M.vquia Filotofova, ADDa P., 118

de, 1]8

Flaubert, G., as, ]6, 45· I JI, lh, zo:t,

Constant de Rebecquc, H.-B. (Benjamin

:tSJ, :tb, :t70, Z94f JOJ

Constant), 87

Flower, N., Z7D

Cooper, J. F., 164, 183

Fonvi:tia, D. I., 16z

CorDeille, P., 183

Fourier, F. M. C., 16, 96, 1 1 1, 114>

CustiDe, A., Marquis de, 19

191, 1 101 ZU, :t:t4o Z:t7, Z9Z

Dan, F. I., 3

Fox, C. J., 187

Danielson, N. F., ZJO

France, A., u7

Danilevsky, N. Ya., :t7

Francoeur, L. B., 131

Dante Aligbieri, u, z4o 159, 164-o tiJ,

Frank, J., ZIJD

1]8

Freud, S., u7

Darwin, C. R., 31, 131

Daudet. .A., z6z

Galakhov, I. P., 148

Delioes, M., 19m

Garibaldi, G., Z70

De-Pule, M. F., z8n

GarDett, Conatance, 186

Derzhav.iD, G. R., 1 59• 16z

Gibboa, E., 43

307

,,

R U SS IAN THINKERS

Gide, A., 36

Holbach, P. H. D., Baron d', no, 137

Godwia, w., 1 10, 217

145, 1 72

Goethe, J. W. VOD, :1], 79> 94> 1]1, 14:1, Homer, 14:1, 159

1 59· 16 ... 166, 179· 18 ... 186, 197•

HolR, 1., 190

:a56, 3o:a

Hugo, V.-M., r83

Gogo!, N. V., 8-9, 1 1, 1.., 16, 18, 13,

Humboldt, K. W., Baron von, l7

p, 136, 159, 161, 172, zlo, 1lz, 161

Hume, D., 30

Goldsmith, 0., 1 56

Huxley, A., 117

Golovacbeva-Paaaeva, ser Panaeva

Goacharov, I. A., us, 1 5:1, 1 59> zh,

Ihlen, H., 22, 1 17, 270

:14:1• :a64D

JliD, Profc:DOr, :a 7n

Goncourt, E. L. A. H. de, 1h

Ippolit, I. K.; z86D

Gorbacheva, V. N., :195D

labutin, N. A., 1 1 5

Gorky, M. M., ·65n, 111

Ivan IV, Tsar ('the Terrible'), 31, 39

Gijna, L., 71

Ivanov, N. A., 31

GraDovsky, T. N., 1, u, 18, I ll• 146,

Ivanov, V. I., rl3

15.., 166, 1 79, 227

Gn:cb, N. I., I, z:a-13

Griboedov, A. S., 17S

James, H., 161, 172

Grigoriev, A. A., 17

Jolmson, S., rio

Grigorovicb, D. V., :ao, 159

Joyce, J., 23

Grimm, A. T., 9• 1 17

Guillaume, J., 1o6n, 107n

Guizot, F., I

Kant, I., 87, 95• 127, 141, zoz, 147, 1s6

Gusev, N. N., 3 1

Karakozov, D. V., ror, 1 1 5, 289

Gutyar, N . M., zl7n, 2l9n

Karamzin, N. M., 1 59> 1 75

Karftv, N. 1., 17n, 45-7, 49

Haag, Luisa , 187

Katkov, M. N., s-6, • •• zo, IJ ... 148,

Haumaat, E., 17, 61

175, 181, zs.., 186n, z88, 2.90

Haxthausen, Baron A., zo

Kautsky, K., 170, ZJ.+

Haydn, J., 128

Kavdin, K. D., 4, r66, no, 127, 171n

Hegel, G. W. F., 5• u, 30, 54• 14·5· 95•

Ketcher, N. Kh., r lJ, 148

99r 108, I l l, 111·2, 117, I J I, 1]6,

Khalturin, S. N., 304D

140· 141, 144·7· ass. r62, 166·7·

Kbemnitser, I. I., 1 61

1701 191-1, :1 1 5, 11 ... JOJ

Kbomyakov, A. S., 6, 1 5, r8

Heine, H., 98, ZOJ, 297

Kin, V. P., z86n

Hdv�tius, C. A., 12.1, 24:1

Kireevsky, I. V., r8

Herder, J. G. \·on, :n;, 85, rz1, 1 36,

Kiselev, Count P. D., 1 1

140, 263

Klcvensky, M . M., :r.h.n

Herodorus, z 3

KolakowsiU, L., u.ii

Hcrun, A. A., 95n

Koltsov, A. V., 1 59> 175

Hcrun, A.· I., xiii, xix-Di, Diii, , • .., 6,

Korf, Baron M. A., ro, n, 1 6

9• u, 15, 17-20, h-3, 86-105 ptusi•,

Korolenko, V . G., IS7• z6], 164D

11o-14, 1 16, 1 16, I J I·J, I JSr 14S•

Konb, E. F.) 16, 148

147·8, rso. 152• I S ... 157• 166-1,

Kosbelev, A. I., 1, 18-19

173, 179·8o, 186-2. 1 1 ptusim, 211-7,

Kosauth, F. L. A., �

269·70, 272n, :174-S• 114-S• 288,

Kraevsky, A. A., n

:aa9n, 291a, z9a-J, 29s�. 299

Kravcbilllky, ur Stepnyak

308

I N D E X O F N A M E S

Krichevsky, M. G., 304-0

Maistre, J. de, n-68, 71-2., 74-S• 77-Bo,

Kropotkin, Prince P. A., :u6, :r.B7, 2.95

94

Krylov, I. A., 162.

Maistre, R. de, 58

Kurbsky, Prince A. M., 39

Marat, J. P., 171

Markevich, B. M., 2.91n

Lamartine, A.-M.-L. de P. de, 2.97

Martov, Yu. 0., 152., 2.u

Lambert, Countess Elizaveta E., 2.9sn

Marx, K.H., 1,17, 32.,41,8S,88, 99• 101,

Lamennais, H. F. R., 16, 66, 12.4> 214

1 10, 1 14-15, 131, 140-1, 2.09, 2. 14,

Lamettrie, J. 0. de, 70

2. 17, 2.19, 2.%4> 2.26, 227n, 2.33-4> 2.361

Landor, W. S., 158

2.78

Lando�, Wand� 2.50

Mathewson, R. W., 2.9sn

Laplace, P.-S., Marquis. de, 41, 70

Maude, A., 2.7

Lassalle, F., uo, 2. 14

Maupassant, G. de, 37n, 2.48-9, 2.53-4,

Lavrov, P. L., 152., 1 80, 2.14> 2.17, 2.24>

2.62.

2.31, 2.361 z83n, 288, 2.89n1 2.91n, 2.95

Mayakovsky, V. V., 1h

Lawrence, D. H., 2.41

Mazon, A., 2.76n

Lehning, A., 1 10n

Marzini, G., Bz-3, 8 s-6, 94> 193, 196-7,

Lemke, M. K., un, 14-0

2.07, 214> 2. 70· 2.97

Lenin, V. I., 2.7n, 104> 1sz, 181, 2 14,

Menshikov, Prince A. S., u

2. 16-17, 2. 19, 2.2.2., 2.zln, 2.30, :r.J;-7,

Merezbkovsky, D. S., 2.6

2.75, 2.86n, 2.97

Micbelet, J., 85-6, 89, 1osn, 132.

Leon, D., 2.7

Mikhailovsky, N. K., 152., 2.22, 224>

Leontiev, K. N., 18, 2.7

2.37-8, 2.51-2., zs6n

Lennontov, M. Yu., 159-60, zoo

Mill, J., zz8

Leroux, P., 7• 89, U4> 16o, 191

Mill, J. S., xx, 5• 54> 102., 12.7, 193,

Le&kov, N. S., 18z

2.00, 2.2.4

Lessing, G. E., I02.n, 12.2

Milyukov, A. P., 16

Linton, W. ]., 86

Milyutin� M. A., 2.95n

Liprandi, I. P., 9

Mirabeau, H.-G. de R., Comte de, 187

List, G. F., 2.14

Mlodetsky, I. 0., 304

Locke, J ., 84

Molescbott, J., 76

Lomonosov, M. V., 162., 174

Molim, J.-B. P., 2.3

Lopatin, G. A., 2.92., 2.94-s

Mom belli, N. A., 16

Loris-Melikov, Count M. T., 304

Mong�:, G., 72.

Louis XIV, King, 37

Montaigne, M. E. de, 2.3, 2.01, 2.97

Louis XVI, King, 1 S4

Montesquieu, C. de S., Baron de, 30,

Louis XVIII, King, 38

71n, 2.01, 2.93

Louis Philippe, King, 8-9, no, 163

Moore, G., 2.62.

Lubbock, P., 2.6

Mom:ll, Lady Ottoline, xiii

Luc:retiWI, u, I s8

Morris, W., 16

LuDa, G., 2.6on

Mourier, J., 2.68n

Lunacharsky, A. V., 181, :r.Bo

Mozart, W. A., uS, 2.49, 2.55

Luther, M., zn-B

Nadezhdin, N. I., 153, 183

Mably, G. B., AbW de, 2.46

Napoleon I, Emperor, 3S• 37-40, 42.,

Machianlli, N., xvi, 2.39

47· sB-9, 6:r., 70, 74> 79· uB, 178, ZSl

Magui!Bky, M. L., 1 3

Napoleon III, Emperor, 97• 2.70

Maikov, A. N., 1 8 , z89n

Navalikhin, S., :r.6n

,,

R U S S IAN THINKERS

Nazarev, V . N., 3 1

Pololllky, V. P., 109D, r un

Nechaev, S . G., 1o:a, :114, uti, :al]n

Polon.U:y, Ya. P., zti7, z90

Nelualov, N. A., 12, rti, r ]ti, 141, rsz,

Proudhon, P.-J., 7, SS• tis, 83, 97• 1 14>

111, 115, US, ZZ90 ZJJ, Z4Z·J, ��

IZ..., 14St Jtiti, 198, 2.09•1:&, U4t U7t

Nerrlic:h, P., 1040

ZZ4> ZZ7t :141

New:lrode, Count K. V., 10

Proullt, M., zz

·Newton, Sir I., 71., l4, 1:17

Pugachev, E. I., 109

Nic:holaa I, Emperor, xvii-mii, r, 7,

Pumpymsky, L. V., :&&tin

9-1], 15, 1 8-:ao, ti], IOJ, uo, no,

Puahkin, A. S., z3-4o 151, 159-tio, 1tiz,

1 2ti, 141, 163, 1ti7, rio, :no, ztirn

1ti4o 1ti9, 175-ti, 178, II], 2.00, �3•

Nietzsche, F. W., z:a, sa, 1 27, z7o

�9-so, 2.55, z79

·

Norov, A. S., ztin

Pustovoit, P. G., 2.8tin

Pyatkovsky, A. P., do

Obninaky, V. P., 2.7n

Odoevsky, Prince A. I., 1 75

Q�telet, L. A. ]., 109

Odoevaky, Prince V. F., 1 75

QuiDet, E., 3

Ogarev, N. P., 2., 10411, 148, rso, 174,

2.91n

Racine, ].,

Ogueva, Natalia A., 150

183

Omodeo, A., 57n

RaziD, S. T., 109

Orlov, Prince A. F., ro

Redkiu, P. G., 148

Owen, R., 191, 2.2.4

Renan, J. E., 2.53, 2.b, 303

Rohespierre, F.-M.-J. de, 1 13, 164o

Panaev, V. I., 9• 16-17, 148, 150, 2.42.

171, J03

P

Rodbutus, J.-K., IJ

anaeva, Evdokia Ya., 1 so

Pucal, B.,

ROORftlt, F. D., 187

u, 79• 2.39

Paakevic:h, Prince I. F., 10- 1 1

Ro-u, J.-J., 30, 40· 53• stS. titin, ti7,

Pec:herin, V . S., 7

79t 94• ZI4t ZZO, Z2.Z·3, Z39•4Q,

Penwoshchikov, D. M., 132.

�ti-7, :�oso-r, 2.54-5• zs7

Pertlev, V. N., 2.7n

Rubi.aahtein, M. M., z7n, 40D

Pestalozzi, J. H., 2.55

Ruge, A., 1040, 107J1, 132.

Peter I, Emperor ('the Great'), 4, ror,

Rusell, B. A. W., Earl, ltiii

1 1 7·18, IS9• lti .. -ti, 199• 2.1 7

Ryleev, K. F., 175

Petraahevsky, M . V., 2. , 15-17, zzs

Philip II, King (of Spain), 1 70

Saint-Just, L. A. L. F. de R. de, 171

Pietac:h, L., zt58n, 2.82.n

Saint-Simon, C.-H. de R., Comte de,

Pi��UeV, D. I., 19, S4t 178, 2.01, uti,

3Zt 8 St 100, l 24t 14St 191, 198, UO,

2.2.0, 2.2.], z:al, 2.82., 2.8JD, 2.815, JOI

U4, 2.92.

Piaemsky, A. F., 142.

Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., ISB, Iti2.

Plato, u, 1 17, 158, 2.1ti, 2.5ti

Saltykov-Shc:bedrin, N. (M. Ye.

Plekbanov, G. V., 102., 1 5z, 2.u, uSn,

Saltykov), 8, 2.13, 2.77D, 2.87, 2.9ti

ZJJ, 2.JS, 2.37

Samarin, Yu. F., 18-19, 54

Pleshc:beev, A. N., 1ti

Sand, George, 7, 89, 1tio, rtiz, 2.b

PobedonostleV, K. P., ti7, 2.67n

Sazouov, N. I., 148

Pogodin, M. P., 54

Schelling, F. W. J. von, s+o 79• 12.1-2.,

Pokrovaky, K. V., 42.n, tizn

124t 117, I]ti-8, 140, 141, 158, 1titi

Polevoy, N. A., 4• 175

Schiller, J. C. F. von, 87, 12.7, rb, rtS4,

PolDer, T. I., 17n

1ti7, Iti!Jo 171, 179, 195• 2.85

310

I N D E X O F N A M E S

Scb�, Jl. VV. von, 161

Tocqucvillc, Jl.-H.-C.-M. C., Comte

Schlegel, K. W. F. von, 1 36

de, 87-9, 209

Scbopenbauer, Jl., s6. 2SI

Tolstoy, Count L. N., :o:-uiii, 1J-Ir

Scott, Sir VV., 164, 294

JHUii,, 90r 9Jr I I J, IZ..., 129, IJ7r

Semo-Solovicvich, N. Jl., 102

103, 209, U Jo ZZ9o 2]8-6o JHUn,,

Sbabspcarc, W., 22, 24, 142, I S9• lh,

262-4, 168, 171·3· :a86, 292-3, 303

164o 208, 238_, 271

Tolstoy, Count N. N., 48, 56

Shakhonkoy, Prince N. A., 1 75

Toynbec, A., 140

Shaw, G. B., 36, 37D

TRdyakovaJr.y, V. K., rb

Shchepk.in, M. S., 148

Trotsky, L. o_, 2 14, 212

Shclgunov, N. V., 26, a83n

Tuchkova-Og&Rva, su Og&Rva

Shilder, N. K., 9, ron, 1 3n

Tukhomitsky, V., :aBrn

Shirinsky-Shikbmatov, Prince P. Jl.,

TurJencv, A. I., 14

1 3

Turgcncv, I. S., :u-uiii, 4-5, 9• rl, 20,

Sbklonky, V. B., 26n, 42n, 53n

2·3• 2So ]6, 4J• 70, 103, I IOD, 1 14·16,

Simmona, E. J., 27

129-30, I J4o 141, 147-8, IJ0·2, 1S+·J,

Siamondi, L. S. de, 87, 214o 230

IJ9• 161, 173-4• 176, 179-Bo, 1h,

Sluchenky, K. K., 2Bon, :a87n, :aBBn

187, 191, 201, 105, 209, 220, 129,

Sollogub, Count V. Jl., 17

241, 248, 261-4, z66-JOJ fHUii"'

Solovicv, E. Jl., 268n

Tyutchev, F. I., z6, S4o 249·50

SoRl, A., 27n, 28, 62, 66

SoRI, G., 278

Spencer, H., S• 54• 1 3 1

Uspcnsky, G. I., 14

Spcnglu, 0., 140

Uvarov, Count S. S., 8, 13

Spcransky, Count M. M., 34o 63

Speshncv, N. A., r6-17, 214

Veksler, I. I., z86n

Spinoza, B., 41, 102n, 143, 297

Venevitinov, D. V., 175

Stael, Anne-Louise-Germainc de, 39

Venturi, F., 127n, 235

Stalin, I. V., 17n, 212

Vergil, 159

Stankcvich, N. V., 1, 14 1-z, 144-6, 163,

Viardot, Pauline, IJS• rio, 262

r66

Vico, G. B., xvi, 140

Stasyulevich, M. �·• 290n, 2950

Vitmer, Jl., 26n

Stein, H. F. K., Count von und zu, 38-9 Vogt, K., 76

Stendbal, JSD, s6·7· 61, 66, 1 30, zoz,

Vogiie, E. M., Vicomte de, 22, 26, 28,

270, 294

66

Stepnya.k, S. M., 1 15, 231, 195

Volkhovsky, F., 295n

Sterm, L., JO

Volkonsky, Prince P. M., 9

Stimer, M., xix

VoltaiR, J. F.-M. A. de, 67-8, 77• 90•

Strakhov, N. N., rl, 180-1, 293

I I 7, 1270 I J 7·8, 1 64, 1 7Jo 189, 122,

StraUS!!, D., 114

•46

Suvorin, A. S., JOJ-5

Vorontsov, V. P., 210

Vorovsky, V. V., 286n

Taine, H. A., 79• :!.OJ

Vovchok, M., z88n

Talleyrand-Perigord, C. M. de, Jil

Vyazemsky, Prince P. A., z8, 175

Thien, L. A., 8, JC

Tibuius Gracchus, 1 7 1

Tkachev, P . N., 214o :1 16-17, uo, UJ,

Wackenroder, W. H., 78

136-7, 283n

Wagner, R., 238, 170

;I

JI I

R U S S IAN THINKERS

Weitling, W., 17, 109, 14S

ZaichDenlty, P. G., 101, 214

Wells, H. G., J6

Zarin, E. F., :zBsn

Wet, M. L., nn

7.aaulich, Vera I., 2J2

Woolf, VirgiDia, J6, I sB

Zclilllky, V. A., :zlrn

Zerlkonlty, V. V., 27n

YaltoftDko, Profeaor, 27n

Zhibrev, S. P., S9

Y9kovlev, I. A., 186-7

Zhukonky, V, A., 159, 175

Yaltubovich, P. F., 29lin

Zola, E., 262

Yazykov, N. M., 14

Zweig, S., 26

3 1 2

Document Outline

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

CONTENTS

Author's Preface

Editorial Preface

Introduction: A Complex Vision by Aileen Kelly

Russian Thinkers

Russia and 1848

The Hedgehog and the Fox

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

A Remarkable Decade

I. The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia

II. German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow

III. Vissarion Belinsky

IV. Alexander Herzen

Russian Populism

Tolstoy and Enlightenment

Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament

I

II

III

Appendix

Index of Names

Content

Berlin Isaiah Russian Thinkers