Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

made only by minorities 'if only they do not destroy each other'. As

for socialism, it was a fantasy. It is characteristic of Russians, says his

hero and mouthpiece, Potugin, in Smolte, 'to pick up an old, wornout shoe which long, long ago fell from the foot of a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, and, placing it reverently on one's head, to treat it as

a sacred object'. As for equality, to the revolutionary Lopatin he

said, 'We are not, all of us, really going to walk about in identical

yellow tunics a Ia Saint-Simon, all buttoned at the back?'1 Still, they

were the young, the party of freedom and generosity, the party of the

have-nots, of those in pain or at least in distress; he would not refuse

them his sympathy, his help, his love, even while all the time looking

over his shoulder guiltily at his right-wing friends to whom he tried

again and again to minimise his unceasing flirtation with the left. On

his visits to Moscow or St Petersburg he tried to arrange meetings

with groups of radical students. Sometimes the conve�tions went well,

at other times, particularly when he tried to charm them with his

reminiscences of the 40s, they tended to become bored, contemptuous,

and resentful. Even when they liked or admired him, he felt that a

gulf divided them, divided those who wanted to destroy the old world,

root and branch, from those who, like him, wished to save it, because

in a new world, created by fanaticism and violence, there might be

too little worth living for.

It was his irony, his tolerant scepticism, his lack of passion, his

'velvet touch', above all his determination to avoid too definite a social

or political commitment that, in the end, alienated both sides. Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, despite their open opposition to 'the progressives',

embodied unshakeable principles and remained proud and selfconfident, and so never became targets for those who threw stones at Turgenev. His very gifts, his power of minute and careful observation,

his fascination with the varieties of character and situation as such, his

detachment, his inveterate habit of doing justice to the full complexity

1 See German Lopatin's reminiscences in 1. 8. Turge� fl fiDspomilltJtri­

Jillh rtrJDiy•tsi!JIIffllfJ-StmitksytJJIIii!Jfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1930), p. u4.

:l-9:1

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and diversity of goals, attitudes, beliefs-these seemed to them morally

self-indulgent and politically irresponsible. Like Montesquieu, he was

accused by the radicals of too much description, too little criticism.

Beyond all Russian writers, Turgenev possessed what Strakhov

described as his poetic and truthful genius-a capacity for rendering

the very multiplicity of interpenetrating human perspectives that

shade imperceptiblyintoeach other,nuancesofcharacterand behaviour,

motives and attitudes, undistorted by moral passion. The defence of

civilisation by the spoilt but intelligent Pavel Kirsanov is not a caricature, and carries a kind of conviction, while the defence of what are apparently the very same values by the worthless Panshin in the NtSt

ofGmtlifollt does not, and is not meant to do so; Lavretsky's Slavophil

feeling is moving and sympathetic; the populism of both the radicals

and the conservatives in Smoltt is-and is intended to be- repulsive.

This clear, finely discriminating, slightly ironical vision, wholly dissimilar from the obsessed genius of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, irritated all those who craved for primary colours, for certainty, who looked

to writers for moral guidance and found none in Turgenev's scrupulous,

honest, but-as it seemed to them-somewhat complacent ambivalence.

He seemed to enjoy his very doubts: he would not cut too deep. Both

his great rivals found this increasingly intolerable. Dostoevsky, who

began as an enthusiastic admirer, came to look on him as a smiling,

shallow, cosmopolitan pouur, a cold-hearted traitor to Russia. Tolstoy

thought him a gifted and truthful writer but a moral weakling, and

hopelessly blind to the deepest and most agonising spiritual problems

of mankind. To Herzen he was an amiable old friend, a gifted artist,

and a feeble ally, a reed that bent too easily before every storm, an

inveterate compromiser.

Turgenev could never bear his wounds in silence. He complained,

he apologised, he protested. He knew that he was accused of lack of

depth or seriousness or courage. The reception of Fathers and Children

continued to prey upon him. 'Seventeen years have passed since the

appearance of Fathers and Chi/drm,' he wrote in 1 88o, 'yet the attitude of the critics . . . has not become stabilised. Only last year, I happened to read in a journal apropos Bazarov, that I am nothing

but a bashi-bazouk1 who beats to death men wounded by others. '1

1 Barbarous Turkish mercenary.

• Preface to the 1 88o edition of his novels. Solmmit ID(IIifltflii, vo}. u,

PP· 3°7·8.

293

R U SSIAN T H INKERS

His sympathies, he insisted again and again, were with the victims,

never the oppressors-with peasants, students, artists, women, civilised

minorities, not the big battalions. How could his critics be so blindl As

for Bazarov, there was, of course, a great deal wrong with him, but

he was a better man than his detractors; it was easy enough to depict

radicals as men with rough exteriors and hearts of gold; 'the trick is

to make Bazarov a wild wolf, and still manage to justify him • . .'1

The one step Turgenev refused to take was to seek an alibi in the

doctrine of art for art's sake. He did not say, as he might easily have

done, 'I am an artist, not a pamphleteer; I write fiction, which must

not be judged by social or political criteria; my opinions are my private

affair; you don't drag Scott or Dickens or Stendhal or even Flaubert

before your ideological tribunals-why don't you leave me alone?' He

never seeks to deny the social responsibility of the writer; the doctrine

of social commitment was instilled into him once and for all by his

adored friend Belinsky, and from it he never wholly departed. This

social concern colours even his most lyrical writing, and it was this

that broke through the reserve of the revolutionaries he met abroad.

These men knew perfectly well that Turgenev was genuinely at his

ease only with old friends of his own class, men who held views that

could not conceivably be described as radical-with civilised liberals or

country squires with whom he went duck-shooting whenever he

could. Nevertheless, the revolutionaries liked him because he liked

them, because he sympathised with their indignation : 'I know I am

only a stick they use to beat the Government with, but' (at this point,

according to the exiled revolutionary Lopatin, who reports this conversation, he made an appropriate gesture) 'let them do it, I am only too glad.'1 Above all, they felt drawn to him because he was responsive

to them as individuals and did not treat them simply as representatives

of parties or oudooks. This was, in a sense, paradoxical, for it was

precisely individual social or moral characteristics that, in theory, these

men tried ·to ignore; they believed in objective analysis, in judging men

sociologically, in terms of the role that, whatever their conscious