Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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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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.

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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