Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

sort of member of the gentry. Bazarov spends his afternoon in dissecting

frogs. 'A decent chemist', he tells his shaken host, 'is twenty times

1 Sorel declares that this passage occurs in a letter which, according

to the economist Lujo Brentano, Marx wrote to one of his English friends,

Professor Beesly (RijltxifJns sur Ia rJiolttut, 7th ed. [Paris, 1 930 ], p. 199,

note z). I have not found it in any published collection of Marx's letters.

278

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

more use than any poet.' Arkady, after consulting Bazarov, gently

draws a volume of Pushkin out of his father's hands, and slips into

them BUchner's Kraft und Stoff',! the latest popular exposition of

materialism. Turgenev describes the older Kirsanov walking in his

garden: 'Nikolay Petrovich dropped his head, and passed his hand over

his face. "But to reject poetry," he thought again, "not to have a

feeling for art, for nature . . • " and he cast about him, as if trying to

understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature.' All

principles, Bazarov declares, are reducible to mere sensations. Arkady

asks whether, in that case, honesty is only a sensation. 'You find this

hard to swallowl' says Bazarov. 'No, friend, if you have decided to

knock everything down, you must knock yourself down, too! • . . '

This is the voice of Bakunin and Dobrolyubov : 'one must clear the

ground'. The new culture must be founded on real, that is materialist,

scientific values: socialism is just as unreal and abstract as any other

of the 'isms' imported from abroad. As.for the old aesthetic, literary

culture, it will crumble before the realists, the new, tough-minded

men who can look the brutal truth in the face. 'Aristocracy, liberalism,

progress, principles . . . what a lot of foreign . . . and useless words. A

Russian would not want them as a gift.' Paul Kirsanov rejects this

contemptuously; but his nephew Arkady cannot, in the end, accept it

either. 'You aren't made for our harsh, bitter, solitary kind of life,'

Bazarov tells him, 'you aren't insolent, you aren't nasty, all you have

is the audacity, the impulsiveness of youth, and that is of no use in

our business. Your type, the gentry, cannot get beyond noble humility,

noble indignation, and that is nonsense. You won't, for instance, fight,

and yet you think yourselves terrific. We want to fight . . . Our dust

will eat out your eyes, our dirt will spoil your clothes, you haven't

risen to our level yet, you still can't help admiring yourselves, you

like castigating yourselves, and that bores us. Hand us others-it is

them we want to break. You are a good fellow, but, all the same, you

are nothing but a soft, beautifully bred, liberal boy . . . '

Bazarov, someone once said, is the first Bolshevik; even though he

is not a socialist, there is some truth in this. He wants radical change

and does not shrink from brute force. The old dandy, Pavel Kirsanov,

protests against this: 'Force? There is force in savage Kalmucks and

Mongols, too . . . What do we want it for? . . . Civilisation, its fruits,

are dear to us. And don't tell me they are worthless. The most

1 Turgenev calls it Stoff t111J Krtlft.

,,

279

R U S S IAN T H I N K ERS

miserable dauber . • . the pianist who taps on the keys in a restaurant

. . . they are more useful than you are, because they represent civilisation and not brute Mongol force. You imagine that you are progressive; you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon !' In the end, Bazarov,

against all his principles, falls in love with a cold, clever, well-born

society beauty, is rejected by her, suffers deeply, and not long after

dies as a result of an infection caught while dissecting a corpse in a

village autopsy. He dies stoically, wondering whether his country had

any real need of him and men like him; and his death is bitterly

lamented by his old, humble, loving parents. Bazarov falls because he

is broken by fate, not through failure of will or intellect. 'I conceived

him', Turgenev later wrote to a young student, 'as a sombre figure,

wild, huge, half-grown out of the soil, powerful, nasty, honest, but

doomed to destruction because he still stands only in the gateway to

the future • . .'1 This brutal, fanatical, dedicated figure, with his

unused powers, is represented as an avenger for insulted human

reason; yet, in the end, he is incurably wounded by a love, by a human

passion that he suppresses and denies within himself, a crisis by which

he is humiliated and humanised. In the end, he is crushed by heartless

nature, by what the author calls the cold-eyed goddess Isis, who does

not care for good or evil, or art or beauty, still less for man, the

creature of an hour; he is not saved either· by his egoism or his altruism,

by faith or works, by rational hedonism or puritanical pursuit of duty;

he struggles to assert himself; but nature is indifferent; she obeys her

own inexorable laws.

Fathers and Children was published in the spring of I 862 and caused

the greatest storm among its Russian readers of any novel before or,

indeed, since. What was Bazarov? How was he to be taken? Was he

a positive or a negative figure? A hero or a devil? He is young, bold,

intelligent, strong, he has thrown off the burden of the past, the

melancholy impotence of the 'superfluous men' beating vainly against

the bars of the prison house of Russian society. The critic Strakhov in

his review spoke of him as a character conceived on a heroic scale. 1

Many years later Lunacharsky described him as the first 'positive' hero

in Russian literature. Does he then symbolise progress? .Freedom? Yet

1 Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, 26 April I 862.

• 'Ottsy i deti', Yrtmyt�, 1 862 No 4, pp. sB-84. See also his essays on

Turgenev in Kriticlmlit st11t'i o6 I. S. Turgtnltlt i L. N. Toll/om (I86z-Bs)

(St Petersburg, J88S)·

FAT H E RS AND C H I LD R E N

his hatred of art and culture, of the entire world of liberal values, his

cynical asides-does the author mean to hold these up for admiration?

Even before the novel was published his editor, Mikhail Katkov,

protested to Turgenev. This glorification of nihilism, he complained,

was nothing but grovelling at the feet of the young radicals. 'T urgenev',

he said to the novelist's friend Annenkov, 'should be ashamed of

lowering the Rag before a radical', or saluting him as an honourable

soldier.1 Katkov declared that he was not deceived by the author's

apparent objectivity: 'There is concealed approval lurking here . . .

this fellow, Bazarov, definitely dominates the others and does not

encounter proper resistance', and he concluded that what Turgenev

had done was politically dangerous.• Strakhov was more sympathetic.

He wrote that Turgenev, with his devotion to timeless truth and

beauty, only wanted to describe reality, not to judge it. He too, however, spoke of Bazarov as towering over the other characters, and declared that Turgenev might claim to be drawn to him by an

irresistible attraction, but it would be truer to say that he feared him.

Katkov echoes this: 'One gets the impression of a kind of embarrassment in the author's attitude to the hero of his story . . . It is as if the author didn't like him, felt lost before him, and, more than this, was