Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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·

•'

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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