Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

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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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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.

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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