Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

he was not surprised. 'They are all attacking me, Reds and Whites,

from above and below, and from the sides, especially from the sides.'1

The Polish rebellion of I 863 and, three years later, Karakozov's

attempt to assassinate the Emperor produced great waves of patriotic

feeling even within the ranks of the liberal Russian intelligentsia.

Turgenev was written off by the Russian critics, of both the right

and the left, as a disappointed man, an expatriate who no longer knew

his country from the distance of Baden-Baden and Paris. Dostoevsky

denounced him as a renegade Russian and advised him to procure a

telescope which might enable him to see Russia a little better.8

In the 70s he began nervously, in constant fear of being insulted

1 From the prose poem 'Uslyshish' sud gluptsa'. Quoted by P. Lavrov in

'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie russkogo obshchestva', Ye111rilt frtlrrJJ,oi rJo/i, vol. :z

(Geneva, I 884), p. I I9.

I Letter to Herzen, 4 June I 867.

3 See Dostoevsky's letter to the poet A. N. Maikov of :z8 August I 867

(quoted in N. M. Gutyar, op. cit. [P· :z86, note I above], pp. 337-40}.

••

2.89

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

and humiliated, to rebuild his relations with the left wing. To his

astonishment and relief, he was well received in Russian revolutionary

circles in Paris and London; his intelligence, his goodwill, his undiminished hatred for tsardom, his transparent honesty and fairmindedness, his warm sympathy with individual revolutionaries, his great charm, had its effect on their leaders. Moreover, he showed

courage, the courage of a naturally timorous man determined to overcome his terrors: he supported subversive publications with secret gifts of money, he took risks in openly meeting proscribed terrorists

shadowed by the police in Paris or London; this melted their resistance.

In 1 876 he published f'irgin Soil (which he intended as a continuation

of Fathtrs and Children) in a final attempt to explain himself to the

indignant young. 'The younger generation', he wrote in the following

year, 'have, so far, been represented in our literature either as a gang

of cheats and crooks . . . or . . . elevated into an ideal, which again is

wrong, and, what is more, harmful. I decided to find the middle way,

to come closer to the truth -to take young people, for the most pan

good and honest, and show that, in spite of their honesty, their cause

is so devoid of truth and life that it can only end in a total fiasco.

How far I have succeeded is not for me to say . . . But they must feel

my sympathy . . . if not for their goals, at least for their personalities. •1

The hero of f'irgin Soil, Nezhdanov, a failed revolutionary, ends by

committing suicide. He does so largely because his origins and character

make him incapable of adapting himself to the harsh discipline of a

revolutionary organisation, or to the slow and solid work of the true

hero of the novel, the practical reformer Solomin, whose quietly

ruthless labours within his own democratically organised factory will

create a more just social order. N ezhdanov is too civilised, too sensitive,

too weak, above all too complex, to fit into an austere, monastic, new

order: he thrashes about painfully, but, in the end, fails because he

'cannot simplify himself'; nor-and this (as Irving Howe has pointed

out)2 is the central point-could Turgenev. To his friend Yakov

Polonsky he wrote: 'If I was beaten with sticks for Fathers and

Children, for f'irgin Soil they will beat me with staves, from both sides,

as usual. '3 Three years later Katk.ov's newspaper again denounced him

1 Letter to M. M. Stasyulevich, 3 January 1 877.

1 See the excellent essay on Turgenev in Politiu a,id the NOflel (London,

1961).

• Letter o£ 23 November 1 876.

FATHERS AND C H I LD R E N

for 'performing clownish somersaults to please the young' .1 As always.

he replied at once: he had not. he said. altered his views by an iota

during the last fony years. 'I am. and have always been. a "gradualist".

an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense. a man expecting

reform rmly from above. I oppose revolution in principle . . • I should

regard it as unworthy of [our youth] and myself. to represent myself in

any other light. '1

By the late 70s his shoncomings had been forgiven by the left. His

moments of weakness, his constant attempts to justify himself before

the Russian authorities, his disavowals of relations with the exiles in

London or Paris-all these sins seem to have been all but forgotten. a

His charm, his sympathy for the persons and convictions of individual

revolutionaries, his truthfulness as a writer, won much goodwill

among the exiles. even though they harboured no illusions about the

extreme moderation of his views and his inveterate habit of taking

cover when the battle became too hot. He went on telling the radicals

that they were mistaken. When the old has lost authority and the new

works badly, what is needed is something that he spoke of in the

Nest of Gentlefolk: 'active patience, not without some cunning and

1 See B. Markevich (under the pseudonym 'lnogorodnyi obyvatel'), 'S

beregov Nevy', Moslwslie t1etlomosti, 9 December 1 879.

I Letter to Yestnik ErJropy (Tiu European Heraltl), 2 January 1 88o,

Solmznit sodzint11ii, vol. I S• p. 1 8 5.

a In I 863 he was summoned back from Paris to be interrogated by a

Senatorial Commission in St Petersburg abOut his relations with Herzen

and Bakunin. How could he have plotted with theae men, he protested, he

who was a life-long monarchist, a butt of bitter onslaughts by the 'Reds'?

After F atlzers and C/zildrtn, he assured the Senaton, his relations with

Herzen, which had never been very close, had been 'severed'. There was an

element of truth in this. But it was not perhaps surprising that Herzen (who

had not forgotten Turgenev's refusal to sign his and Ogarev's manifesto

criticising the shortcomings of the Act of Emancipation of the ser&) should,

characteristically, have referred to 'a white-haired Magdalen of the male sex'

who could not sleep at night for thinking that the Emperor might not have

heasd of her repentance. Turgenev and Herzen saw each other again in

later years, but never again on the same intimate terms. In 1 879 Turgenev

similarly hastened to deny all connection with Lavrov and his fellow revolutionaries. Lavrov, too, forgave him. (For Turgenev's relations with Lavrov and other revolutionary 4!migrt!s see P. L. Lavrov, 'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie

russkogo obshchestva', op. cit. [p. 2 89, note I above], pp. � 149, and Michel

Delines [M. 0. Ashkinazy], TOflrgol•tjfi11t01111fl [Paris, 1888], pp. S3-7 S·)

·'

291

R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

ingenuity'. When the crisis i s upon us, 'when', i n his telling phrase,

'the incompetent come up against the unscrupulous', what is wanted is

practical good sense, not the absurd, nostalgic idyll of Herzen and the

populists, with their blind, idolatrous adoration of the peasant who is

the worst reactionary of the lot. He said over and over again that he

loathed revolution, violence, barbarism. He believed in slow progress,