Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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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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

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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.

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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