Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

revolutionary aims, dangerous Utopianism. Yet he felt that something

new was rising-a vast social mutation of some kind. He declared that

he felt it everywhere. He was repelled and at the same time fascinated

by it. A new and formidable type of adversary of the regime-and of

much that he and his generation of liberals believed in-was coming

into e�istence. Turgenev's curiosity was always stronger than his fears:

he wanted, above everything, to understand the new Jacobins. These

men were crude, fanatical, hostile, insulting, but they were undemoralised, self-confident, and, in some narrow but genuine sense, rational and disinterested. He could not bear to tum his back upon

them. They seemed to him a new, clear-eyed generation, undeluded

by the old romantic myths; above all they were the young, the future

of his country lay in their hands; he did not wish to be cut off from

anything that seemed to him alive, passionate, and disturbing. After

all, the evils that they wished to fight were evils; their enemies were,

to some degree, his enemies too; these young men were wrongheaded, barbarous, contemptuous ofliberals like himself, but they were fighters and martyrs in the battle against despotism. He was intrigued,

horrified and dazzled by them. During the whole of the rest of his

life he was obsessed by a desire to explain them to himself, and perhaps

himself to them.

1 1

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: 'You had content

but no force.' Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: 'And

you have force but no content.'

From a contemporary conversationl

This is the topic pf Turgenev's most famous, and politically most

interesting, novel Fathtrs and Childrm. It was an attempt to give

Aesh and substance to his image of the new men, whose mysterious,

implacable presence, he declared, he felt about him everywhere, and

who inspired in him feelings that he found difficult to analyse. 'There

1 The original epigraph to F athrs 1111d Childrtll, which Turgenev later

discarded. See A. Mazon, Mallf�J(rits pllrisit11s d'/rJafl TrmrguiMrJ (Paris,

1930), PP· 6+-S·

FATHERS AND CHILDREN

was', he wrote many years later to a friend, '-please don't laugh-some

sort of fatum, something stronger than the author himself, something

independent of him. I know one thing: I started with no preconceived

idea, no "tendency"; I wrote naively, as if myself astonished at what

was emerging.'1 He said that the central figure of the novel, Bazarov,

was mainly modelled on a Russian doctor whom he met in a train in

Russia. But Bazarov has some of the characteristics of Belinsky too.

Like him, he is the son of a poor army doctor, and he possesses some

of Belinsky's brusqueness, his directness, his intolerance, his liability

to explode at any sign of hypocrisy, of solemnity, of pompous conservative, or evasive liberal, cant. And there is, despite Turgenev's denials, something of the ferocious, militant, anti-aestheticism of

Dobrolyubov too. The central topic of the novel is the confrontation

of the old and young, of liberals and radicals, traditional civilisation

and the new, hanh positivism which has no use for anything except

what is needed by a rational man. Bazarov, a young medical researcher,

is invited by his fellow student and disciple, Arkady Kinanov, to stay

at his father's house in the country. Nikolay Kinanov, the father, is a

gentle, kindly, modest country gentleman, who adores poetry and

nature, and greets his son's brilliant friend with touching courtesy.

Also in the house is Nikolay Kinanov's brother, Pavel, a retired army

officer, a carefully dressed, vain, pompous, old-fashioned dandy, who

had once been a minor lion in the solons of the capital, and is now

living out his life in elegant and irritated boredom. Bazarov scents

an enemy, and takes deliberate pleasure in describing himself and his

allies as 'nihilists', by which he means no more than that he, and those

who think like him, reject everything that cannot be established by

the rational methods of natural science. Truth alone matten: what

cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or

harmful ballast-'romantic rubbish'-which an intelligent man will

ruthlessly eliminate. In this heapofirrational nonsense Bazarov includes

all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement-literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised

assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, of

landownen and serfs. He believes in strength, will-power, energy,

utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear

off masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable

t From a letter to M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

R U S S IAN THINKERS

facts, only useful knowledge, matter. He clashes almost immediatdy

with the touchy, conventional Pavel Kirsanov: 'At present', he tells

him, 'the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny.' 'Everything�'

asks Pavel Kirsanov. 'Everything.' 'What� Not only art, poetry . . . but

even . . . too horrible to utter . . .' 'Everything.' 'So you destroy every-

thing . . . but surely one must build, too?' 'That's not our business • . .

First one must clear the ground.'

The fiery revolutionary agitator Bakunin, who had just then

esaped from Siberia to London, was saying something of this kind :

the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the

ground, before something new can be built upon it; what this is to be

is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries, our business is to demolish.

The new men, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and

exploiters, and its bogus values-these men will know what to do. The

French anarchist Georges Sorel once quoted Marx as saying 'Anyone

who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.'1

This went beyond the position of Turgenev's radical critics of the

Contemporary: they did have a programme of sorts: they were democratic populists. But faith in the people seems just as irrational to Bazarov as the rest of the 'romantic rubbish'. 'Our peasants', he declares, 'are prepared to rob themselves in order to drink themselves blind at the inn.' A man's first duty is to develop his own powers, to be

strong and rational, to create a society in which other rational men

can breathe and live and learn. His mild disciple Arkady suggests to

him that it would be ideal if all peasants lived in a pleasant whitewashed hut, like the head man of their village. 'I have conceived a loathing for this . . . peasant,' Bazarov says, 'I have to work the skin

off my hands for him, and he won't so much as thank me for it;

anyway, what do I need his thanks for? He'll go on living in his

whitewashed hut, while weeds grow out of me . . . ' Arkady is shocked

by such talk; but it is the voice of the new, hard-boiled, unashamed

materialistic egoism. Nevertheless Bazarov is at his ease with peasants;

they are not self-conscious with him even if they think him an odd