Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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